From left,
PACS students Olivia Charles-Pike, Savannah Parson, Kirwin Seger, and Maeve Gannon prepare to attend the United Nations dinner at this year's Peace & Justice Studies Association Conference in Birmingham, AL. The Baker Institute provided funding for these four students to attend, along with
PACS faculty Polly Walker and Celia Cook-Huffman and anthropology faculty Martina Thomas.
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The theme of this year's PJSA conference was "From Civil Rights to Human Rights." From the PJSA website: "As peace scholars, educators, and activists, we are challenged to rise up and present a new vision, a new strategy, a new engagement of our culture, that will create new relationships and a movement of Justice and Peace for the 21st Century. The new will honor the old, and will build upon it, bringing wisdom, insight, passion, and determination that will carry us forward." Above, from left,
Maeve Gannon, Olivia Charles-Pike, and Savannah Parson hold a conference poster.
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Above, from left,
Polly Walker and students Olivia Charles-Pike, Maeve Gannon, and Savannah Parson enjoy a rooftop view of Birmingham.
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PACS alum Lily Kruglak ('11) is named the year's best young peacemaker and awarded the 2017 Next Generation Peacemaker Award. After having spent a semester in Uganda and Rwanda as a PACS student, Lily started Genocide Awareness and Action Week at Juniata College. The program continues to this date and has a strong impact on the understanding, prevention and amelioration of genocide. Kruglak is currently the reporting and outreach coordinator at Resolve Network in Washington DC., working on sustainable solutions to violent extremism and conducting related research. She spent significant amounts of time doing research in the DRC, working to document violence there as well as community responses to mitigating violence. Her work focuses on vulnerability and resilience, and she collects data on these issues in particular. Kruglak recently completed her Master's degree in Conflict Resolution at Georgetown University and returned to Juniata to serve as a Diversity and Democracy panelist on Sept. 27, where she talked about de-escalation tactics during protests.
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LEARN MORE ABOUT THE PEACE & JUSTICE STUDIES ASSOC.
Check out this link to a
blog post recap of a careers session that Dr. Walker and Kirwin Seger attended during PJSA '17, for a sense of the career "takeaways" students can gain from attending PJSA.
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Coming up this month: Night of a Thousand Dinners
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From PAX-O President Savannah Parson: Night of 1000 Dinners will begin during International Education Week and extend throughout this month.
Tickets will be on sale in Ellis Nov. 6-10 during lunch and dinner. PAX-O is still working on figuring out how the money we raise can be donated and make the biggest impact.
We have some old favorites hosting dinners and some new comers excited to join the tradition!
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Sarah Ullom-Minnich on Druckman peacebuilding master class 10/21
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On October 21, 15 students and faculty with connections to the Baker Institute and PACS program gathered together for a
master class in peacebuilding led by Daniel Druckman
, Professor Emeritus of Public and International Affairs at George Mason University.
The class focused on justice in peace processes, and allowed participants to practice the application of academic research to case studies. The format was a combination of lecture and small group discussion.
As a PACS student, I deeply appreciated the opportunity to explore bridging the gap between theory and practice. While all participants had connections to the PACS curriculum, they also claimed varied disciplinary and personal backgrounds, and these different perspectives made for rich and rigorous discussions.
The case studies we were given were regionally diverse, and forced us to think in different ways about the presence of justice within negotiating procedures and outcomes, and how those related to creating durable and sustainable peace in intractable conflicts. I felt that it was an excellent supplement to the rest of my coursework, and that it provided an excellent avenue to engage with important concepts in the discipline.
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"I deeply appreciated the opportunity to explore bridging the gap between theory and practice...[the class] provided an excellent avenue to engage with important concepts in the discipline."
-Ullom-Minnich, PACS '18
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PACS staffer Stacia Fleegal reflects on Steil's literary reading 10/4
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Jennifer Steil, award-winning author and journalist, gave a reading from her memoir on Oct. 4 in BAC A100.
Steil's memoir,
The Woman Who Fell From the Sky, tells of her spending 2006 serving as editor-in-chief of a newspaper in Yemen. I loved this book’s honest grappling with cultural differences and white privilege, as well as the author's friend-talking-to-a-friend style of writing.
Approximately 40 people attended the reading on Oct. 4. The excerpts Steil read were at turns funny (pro tip: know what your American friends are sending in their care packages to avoid offending Yemeni customs agents!) and serious (conditions for Somalian refugees and the dangers of travel for women).
One profound takeaway from Steil's visit, for both Dr. Walker and myself, was learning of the power of poetry in Yemeni peacebuilding efforts. According to Steil, to work ethically in another cultural context, one must understand how a culture has traditionally solved conflict. One traditional Yemeni process of resolving conflict is through poetry. Defendants pose their positions through carefully crafted poems, and the sheiks hand down their decisions in verse, seeking common ground and providing face saving for the party with less power or gain. These are particularly powerful processes in a primarily oral society with lower literacy rates.
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I know Jennifer Steil personally, so it was a pleasure to introduce Dr. Walker to her work, champion her as a prospective PACS guest speaker, and facilitate her visit. I look forward to the possibility of bringing to campus more literary artists who explore themes of peace and conflict at home and abroad.
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The Baker Institute for Peace & Conflict Studies | 814-641-3464| bakerins@juniata.edu
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