Transrational Perspectives In Peace Education

This volume investigates how peace education can contribute to unfold collective and individual potentials for peace and conflict transformation. It explores how to cultivate a relational process that honours the interconnectedness of educators, students, researchers and participants in all their human faculties. This includes acknowledging not only the rational, but also the embodied, emotional, mental and spiritual dimensions, in their complexity and in their ongoing, dynamic transformations. Motivated by the possibilities and challenges involved in this process, this book explores the nexus between transrational peace philosophy, elicitive approaches to conflict transformation and peace education. The first part discusses the transrational peace philosophy and locates it within a broader field of peace education, while the second part reflects on how transrational perspectives are tapped into within peace education approaches. In total, eight researchers and practitioners engage productive tensions that unfold in different geographical spaces, in the classrooms, and within and between us through embodied, affective, societal and transpersonal lenses. Transrational Perspectives in Peace Education encourages both researchers and practitioners to experiment with and engage the multifaceted potentials that are involved in transrational perspectives within peace education. This book was originally published as a special issue of Journal of Peace Education.

This book comprehensively gathers the current academic literature, field expertise and artistic developments on Wolfgang Dietrich’s Many Peaces theory, in the ways it has been conceptualized and practiced by peace and conflict workers around the world. Both scholars and practitioners challenge and creatively explore the field of transrational peace philosophy, contributing their insights on elicitive methods and conflict mapping. The book is further enriched by artistic perspectives on integrative approaches to theatre for living and intercultural soundscapes. The articles collected here respond with innovative strength and vigor to the worldwide need for further research on peace and for practical approaches to conflict transformation. This book therefore equally appeals to scholars, peacebuilders and practitioners as well as artists engaged in conflict transformation.

This book presents commentaries by a leading international group of peace education scholars and practitioners concerning Reardon’s peace education theory and intellectual legacy. The guiding question throughout the book is: How can her foundational work be used to advance the theory and practice of peace education? In an attempt to find answers, the contributing authors explore three general areas of inquiry: (1) Theoretical Foundations of Peace and Human Rights Education; (2) Feminism and the Gender Perspective as Pathways of Transformation Toward Peace and Justice; and (3) Peace Education Pedagogy and Practices. A contemplative commentary by Reardon herself rounds out the coverage

This edited collection brings together a series of conceptual explorations and practical case studies to illuminate a developing innovative praxis of transdisciplinary peace and education. Drawing on the work of the Cambridge Peace and Education Research Group as well as international scholars, this book responds to calls for transdisciplinary peace and education praxis and presents innovative examples of peace and education research practices, peace interventions in educational settings, and alternative ontologies in peace and education work. Foregrounding the concept of ‘second-order reflexivity’, the book prioritises the lived experiences and viewpoints of struggling populations regarding the worth of ‘peace’ as grounded within their contexts. Ultimately, this book showcases how the practices of peace education and research can challenge the binaries of modern and postmodern approaches and provide examples of holistic transdisciplinary approaches that embrace complexity and criticality. Contributing new knowledge to peace and education, this volume will be of great interest to academics, post-graduate students and researchers in the field of peace education, peace studies and development studies. The Introduction of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.taylorfrancis.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Funded by the Gates Foundation. The Afterword of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. Funded by the Georg-Eckert-Institute.

Over the past five decades, both peace education and human rights education have emerged distinctly and separately as global fields of scholarship and practice. Promoted through multiple efforts (the United Nations, civil society, grassroots educators), both of these fields consider content, processes, and educational structures that seek to dismantle various forms of violence, as well as move towards cultures of peace, justice and human rights. Educating for Peace and Human Rights Education introduces students and educators to the challenges and possibilities of implementing peace and human rights education in diverse global sites. The book untangles the core concepts that define both fields, unpacking their histories and conceptual foundations, and presents models and key research findings to help consider their intersections, convergences, and divergences. Including an annotated bibliography, the book sets forth a comprehensive research agenda, allowing emerging and seasoned scholars the opportunity to situate their research in conversation with the global fields of peace and human rights education.

In Humanities Perspectives in Peace Education: Re-Engaging the Heart of Peace Studies, scholar-teachers across a variety of humanities fields explore the content, methods, and pedagogies that are unique to their respective disciplines in contributing to the study of peace and justice. In recent decades, even as peace scholarship has burgeoned, many peace studies texts—including those that purport to be interdisciplinary in nature—have emphasized social science perspectives and, in some cases, have foregone exploration of the role of the humanities altogether in comprehensive peace education. While humanities scholars continue to stake out space for peace scholarship within their fields, no volume has attempted to collect the wisdom of multiple humanities disciplines in order to make the case for their critical role in authentic peace education. Humanities Perspectives in Peace Education addresses that shortcoming in the field of peace studies by exploring the ways in which the humanities are uniquely situated to contribute particular content, knowledge, skills, and values required of comprehensive peace education, scholarship, and activism. These include the development of empathy and understanding, creative vision and imagination, personal and communal transformation toward “the good” in society (such as the pursuit of justice, nonviolence, freedom, and human thriving), and field-specific analytical lenses of their own, among other contributions. Both teachers and students of peace will find value in this interdisciplinary humanities volume. Each chapter of Humanities Perspectives in Peace Education offers a deep-dive into a particular humanities field—including philosophy, literature, language and culture studies, rhetoric, religion, history, and music—to mine the field’s unique contributions to peace and justice studies. Scholars ask: “What are we missing in peace education if we fail to include this academic discipline?” Chapters include suggestions for peace pedagogies within the humanities field as well as bibliographies and suggestions for further reading.

In this book, Kevin Kester details how the United Nations promotion of higher education for peace and international understanding sometimes unintentionally contributes to the reproduction of conflict and violence across diverse cultures. He shows this through an indepth examination of peace curricula, pedagogy and policy in one United Nations higher education institution, where he indicates how dominant philosophical and pedagogical models that signify acceptable peace education ultimately undermine the very goals of educational peacebuilding. Kester contends that theoretical and pedagogical training must develop beyond the dominant psycho-social, rational and state-centric assumptions that permeate the field today if higher education is to better contribute to personal and societal peacebuilding. Drawing from the fields of educational philosophy and sociology, he argues for new concepts of poststructural violence and second order reflexivity that can assist scholars in reducing conflict and building peace in lasting ways. He complements his fieldwork findings with personal reflections throughout the book to reimagine the transformative possibilities of peacebuilding education for the 21st century.

Transrational Peaces is a new approach in contemporary Peace Research. It considers the rational and the spiritual sphere of human perception to be essential for the understanding of peace. In this book the Austrian-Indian researcher Samrat Schmiem Kumar presents the Indian tradition of Bhakti Yoga, and demonstrates the value of Indian philosophy for contemporary discussions on peace. In the philosophy of Bhakti, life is a playful and aesthetic relationship between human and the cosmos. The book opens the field of Peace Studies beyond the well-known horizons of the discipline in Europe and the United States.