Past Research Groups
Peace Education in Societies in Transition
This research group responds to the need to contribute to the prevention of (re)eruption of violence through the development of teachers’ conflict transformation competences, qualities, skills and attitudes in educational settings in societies in transition.
It creates an integrated framework for analysis for a peace education model for highly conflictive settings developed together with teachers and school directives, local and international universities as well as civil society peace and conflict actors in urban settings, currently with a particular focus on the cases of Medellin (Colombia) and Guadalajara (Mexico). Using an innovative holistic peace approach and fostering the creation of new technologies, this research group aims to diminish violence and improve the wellbeing of the educational community (students, teachers and staff) while making a contribution to the deeper transformation and sustainable peace in fragile societies.
Peace Journalism
This research group focuses on questions of peace journalism and its various forms. Starting from what constitutes peace journalism and how it can work, a central concern of this research group is to conceptualize peace journalism from an elicitive approach towards conflict transformation.
From this perspective journalists are never objective observers but always actively engaged parties in the conflict. Hence, the way stories are produced as well as narratives and images are chosen and published have direct impact on ongoing conflict dynamics. For this reason this research group focuses on elicitive peace journalism by tackling ethical and methodological questions of journalism, such as power relations, subject and object positions, the connectivity of image and reality and the question of telling truth. Thus, a primary aim of this group is to contribute additional perspectives to the debate on Johan Galtung’s proposal of peace journalism by grounding its work on peace thinker and practitioner John Paul Lederach.
Body Oriented Approaches and Arts in Peace and Conflict Transformation
This research group is dedicated to investigating artistic and body-oriented approaches to peace and conflict.
It seeks to understand the potential of these approaches particularly in the areas of applied peace and conflict work, in didactics and as regards their epistemological and methodological potential for peace research. Based on a process-model of the human being that is grounded in system theory and humanistic psychology it is assumed that (conflict) transformation is relational and concerns conflict workers and parties as whole human being. Similar goes for both the experience of peace just as well as for the engagement of the researcher in research or learners in learning. Body-oriented approaches and arts therefore have a special role as they allow accessing a vast range of human experiencing that complement and expand cognitive approaches.
This research group deepens the methodological understanding of arts and body-oriented approaches and creates a laboratory for experiential experimentation and systematic reflection.