Higher Education Pedagogies for Peacebuilding: Developing Hubs in The Balkans, Latin America and The Horn of Africa

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The role of higher education in conflict is an under-researched field, as is its potential to address the legacies of conflict and contribute to conflict recovery. While there are pockets of good practice in different parts of the world there has been no systematic exploration of ways in which university teaching, research or engagement can positively impact on aspects of conflict and peacebuilding. This networking grant will begin to address this gap by focusing particularly on the arts and humanities and sharing areas of innovation and creativity in higher education teaching between different conflict affected countries. It will employ an action research approach, working directly with students to collect images, texts and music that celebrate shared cultural memory, and examine the unifying and divisive way in which such images can be deployed. By building partnerships with local civil society organisations, higher education institutions will encourage direct student involvement in community facing issues, addressing questions of inequality, ethnicity and difference and exploring the value of experiential learning in personal and social development. The project will work closely with researchers from Los Andes University in Bogota, Columbia; Sarajevo University in Bosnia and Herzegovina and The University of Rwanda in Kigali, Rwanda, each of whom are already involved in peace building initiatives within their own areas. The team will meet in three regionally based 5 day workshops and focus on sharing and developing approaches already used in their home institutions. Together they will look at possibilities for adapting these for use in other areas and build the images and texts created into a bank of module outlines and teaching resources. They will support each other to connect with community members in each location to form locally based partnerships working on issues of inequality, discrimination and citizenship, some of the drivers of conflict in each region. Through intensive but practice facing discussions the team will develop a theoretical understanding of the role a university might play in conflict and peacebuilding. Each of the three workshops will include a one day seminar for other members of the institution to identify how these materials and approaches might be relevant to other discipline areas and encourage senior management to take seriously their strategies for local engagement. In addition, online discussions and webinars scheduled between the workshops will share developments with other colleagues in the region, building on existing networks to form a series of regional hubs, in the Balkans (Bosnia and Herzegovina), Latin America (Columbia) and The Horn of Africa (Rwanda). The project will establish a critical reference group formed from academics and civil society stakeholders working in this field who will contribute to these online discussions and critique materials and approaches developed during this project. It will also enable us to share resources beyond the three participating institutions. It will use the opportunity of the Bosnia workshop to connect with the Why Remember Festival, (ww.warmfoundation.org); an international network of artists, photographers and journalists committed to recording histories of violence with excellence and integrity This will provide the opportunity to present to a wider audience in the field of history, violence and memory and further establish this as a viable research field and further set the agenda for future research in this area. Images and short clips taken by students recording artefacts and incidents from the different areas will be edited into a short film to be shown at the 2019 festival. The project will also explore opportunities for moving the festival to Rwanda in 2020 which will provide further opportunities for dissemination of project outputs.