Tag Archives: nonviolence

Peace Frequency Podcast – Community Based Peacebuilding Series

This month I had the great privilege of helping co-facilitate and design the USIP online course, Community Based Peacebuilding: Engaging Youth. The main instructor for the course was Dr. Alison Milofsky, who is a brilliant, dynamic and gifted facilitator. Part of the course experience involved four great interviews on the Peace Frequency podcast. Alison and I co-hosted these episodes and were able to bring some great stories and perspectives into the course.

Peace Frequency w/ Guest, Mark Brimhall-Vargas. In this episode we explored the different definitions and types of dialogue and discussed some of the important complexities involving race, class, gender, sexual orientation and other dimension of identity.

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Peace Frequency w/ Guest, Ariana Barth. In this episode Ariana shares her experience facilitating dialogues with youth who come from communities engaged in intense identity based conflicts.

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Peace Frequency w/ Guest, Dominic Barter. In this episode we speak with one of the world’s most well-respected practitioners of dialogue who sheds light on concepts such as community, relationship, justice, and conflict.

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Peace Frequency Special Episode w/ Guests, Arthur Romano, Elavie Ndura, Nadine Bloch, and Kazu Haga. In this special episode we celebrate and interrogate the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. by speaking with four scholars, practitioners, and activists who have immersed themselves in nonviolent movements in unique and distinct ways.

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Peace Frequency w/ Guest, Jeff Guerra. In this episode we speak with a Colombian DJ and producer whose music is helping build and spread messages of peace across lines of cultural, racial, and ethnic difference.

Music Plays Crucial Role in Nonviolent Civic Movements

This is another post about the Music of Nonviolent Action event that I helped organize and facilitate back in June of this year.

This post was written by Viola Granger and originally appeared on the United States Institute of Peace’s Olive Branch blog.

In Libya’s 2011 uprising, protesters pumped loud music from radios or CD players in the streets in front of government buildings, then fled from the inevitable rush of security forces. The nonviolent early days of Egypt’s revolution that same year spawned a raft of new independent music groups. In Turkey, the “Song of Pots and Pans” exhorts political leaders to stop their lies and repressive tactics.

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How Technology Can Help Activists Nagivate nder Pressure

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This past week I participated in a great event at USIP organized by the PeaceTech initiative and Dr. Maria Stephan, a senior policy fellow at USIP’s Academy for International Conflict Management and Peacebuilding. The event looked at the role that technology can play to aid nonviolent activists around the world. I had the opportunity as a result of this event to interview some amazing activists and technologists about their work addressing this challenge.

This post below originally appeared on the United States Institute of Peace’s Olive Branch blog and was written by Noel Dickover, Senior Program Officer at USIP.

How can technology support activists using nonviolent conflict approaches in difficult places?  A two-day workshop at the United States of Peace (USIP) that gathered 70 civic activists, policymakers, technologists, NGO leaders, and education professionals sparked eight distinct, innovative projects that will aim to overcome limits to mobilizing citizens in repressive places.

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Summer Institute for Teaching Peace

summer institute teaching peace news icon_0This week I have the privilege of attending and presenting at Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies’ Summer Institute for Teaching Peace in the 21st Century. This institute brings together college and university educators from various disciplines to Notre Dame for the week to learn about, strategize, develop a plan for how to create or enhance peace studies programs at their schools. This year’s institute brings together educators from several African universities as well, from Sudan, South Sudan, Kenya, and Ethiopia.

On Thursday, I will be facilitating two sessions that introduce the participants to USIP’s catalog of online courses and to help them think of ways to integrate these courses into their budding programs.

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The Power and Promise of Online Learning

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This week my friend and fellow peace and nonviolence educator, Joshua Cooper, had an article we wrote together posted on the USIP website. The article describes how Joshua integrated the use of USIP’s online, self-paced course, Civil Resistance and the Dynamics of Nonviolent Conflict (which I helped design), into his work with indigenous Cambodian activists living along the border of Cambodia and Vietnam AND with students in his intro political science class at the University of Hawaii.

Over the past eight months, USIP’s Academy has launched 8 self-paced, online courses, registering more than 3,000 people in more than 134 countries. The work, however, is not solely a numbers game. Peacebuilders, activists and educators working in conflict zones must be able to take the knowledge, skills and perspectives that USIP offers online and adapt them for their own specific needs in the field.  A case of young Khmer activists in Vietnam and Cambodia and another involving students in Hawaii interested in peacemaking illustrate the need.

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Rhythms at the Intersection of Peace and Conflict: The Music of Nonviolent Action

This past Tuesday, USIP and the Conflict Prevention & Resolution Forum co-hosted and event at USIP presenting an exciting new movie followed by a panel discussion on the intersection between music and nonviolent civic action.

My USIP colleague, Maria Stephan, and my Freedom Beat partner, Timothy O’Keefe envisioned  this event and over the course of several weeks we worked with our friends and USIP and with the CPRF to organize a great event that brought in over 75 people to USIP to explore an exciting topic in a creative way.

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TEDx Talk at American University

This past weekend I gave a TEDx talk at American University. The theme of the event was “Exploring Our Global Future.” The title of my talk was, “Bridging the Distance: Teaching and Learning Peace Online.” In short, the talk laid out my reasons for believing in online learning as a valuable development in the field of education and how online learning can be infused with the values of peace and nonviolence. I also lay out in the talk what I have come to call, “The Seven Blossoms of Peace Education,” which is a pedagogical framework that any educators can apply to their work to integrate peace and nonviolence into their classrooms.

Workshop on Intercutural Competence and Nonviolent Action for Georgetown University’s Center for Social Justice

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On Friday, I had the honor and privilege of facilitating a workshop at Georgetown University for their The Center for Social Justice Research, Teaching and Service (CSJ).  the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor (KI), and the Center for Multicultural Equity and Access (CMEA). This year Georgetown launched their Social Justice Leadership Training Institute (SJLTI), a small-group intensive experience for undergraduate students who wish to deepen their commitment to and engagement with issues of social justice. Through an 8-week skills-building, cohort-based experience with accomplished social justice activists and one another, SJLTI participants will learn and reflect on ways to creatively and effectively work for social justice. I was invited by two of the most amazing and inspiring peace and social justice educators I know – Amanda Munroe and Dr. Andria Wisler.

The workshop I facilitated was titled, The Intercultural Dimensions of Nonviolent Action: Power, Participation and Progress. The workshop explored two concepts – intercultural competence and nonviolent action as a method of struggle – and why one is an integral part of the other’s success. For the past couple weeks I have been giving some talks and presentation on this topic. My interest in the connection was spurred by a three day training I did a few weeks ago to become a qualified administrator of the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI). Ever since that training I have been finding a number of valuable connections between that cultural work and the theory and strategy behind nonviolent action.

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Online Civil Resistance Course Launches

After about a year of development, USIP has released a self-study, online version of the course, Civil Resistance and the Dynamics of Nonviolent Conflict. I started working on this course with my colleagues at USIP and ICNC in 2012. Having recently joined USIP, full-time, I am very pleased that this was one of the first self-study onlie course USIP released. I look forward to seeing how learners engage with the course, what kind of impact it will have, and how we will continue to refine it and make it even better in the months and years to come.

Nonviolence Presentation at New School of VA

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This past Thursday, my friend and colleague, Althea, and I facilitated a presentation on nonviolence for a group 100 6-12 graders at the New School of Virginia. My friends and former colleague, Travis Cooper, invited us to give this workshops as part of a learning unit he was doing with his students looking at civic activism.

This was a great opportunity for Althea and I to mix concepts from various orientations and conceptions of nonviolence – the ICNC strategic nonviolent action orientation and the Kingian nonviolence orientation.

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