Transrational Resonances

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 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 sheds new light on transrational approaches to peace research and highlights elicitive approaches to facilitation. Rather than encouraging researchers, teachers and practitioners to control and suppress their own positionality, the book argues that they can see themselves as a potential (re)source that can be creatively tapped for their work. Using dance as a central metaphor, it seeks to reposition research and facilitation as a truly experiential process where the entirety of human experiences and epistemologies can be brought into interplay, opening up new sources of knowledge. Providing a cutting-edge theoretical framework and based on his practical experience, the author demonstrates that facilitation and research are not just cognitive, but can also be(come) embodied, emotional, intuitive, relational and spiritual. By proposing a systematic, methodological framework for research and facilitation, the book offers practical guidance for peace practitioners, facilitators and researchers interested in working through all dimensions of their being and engaging with conflict transformation in a holistic way.

The purpose of this text is to elicit discussion, reflection, and action specific to pedagogy within education, especially higher education, and circles of experiential learning, community organizing, conflict resolution and youth empowerment work. Vulnerability itself is not a new term within education; however the pedagogical imperatives of vulnerability are both undertheorized in educational discourse and underexplored in practice. This work builds on that of Edward Brantmeier in Re-Envisioning Higher Education: Embodied Pathways to Wisdom and Transformation (Lin, Oxford, & Brantmeier, 2013). In his chapter, “Pedagogy of vulnerability: Definitions, assumptions, and application,” he outlines a set of assumptions about the term, clarifying for his readers the complicated, risky, reciprocal, and purposeful nature of vulnerability, particularly within educational settings. Creating spaces of risk taking, and consistent mutual, critical engagement are challenging at a moment in history where neoliberal forces impact so many realms of formal teaching and learning. Within this context, the divide between what educators, be they in a classroom or a community, imagine as possible and their ability to implement these kinds of pedagogical possibilities is an urgent conundrum worth exploring. We must consider how to address these disconnects; advocating and envisioning a more holistic, healthy, forward thinking model of teaching and learning. How do we create cultures of engaged inquiry, framed in vulnerability, where educators and students are compelled to ask questions just beyond their grasp? How can we all be better equipped to ask and answer big, beautiful, bold, even uncomfortable questions that fuel the heart of inquiry and perhaps, just maybe, lead to a more peaceful and just world? A collection of reflections, case studies, and research focused on the pedagogy of vulnerability is a starting point for this work. The book itself is meant to be an example of pedagogical vulnerability, wherein the authors work to explicate the most intimate and delicate aspects of the varied pedagogical journeys, understandings rooted in vulnerability, and those of their students, colleagues, clients, even adversaries. It is a work that “holds space.”

Reconciliation studies are concerned with the processes of rebuilding and improving damaged relationships after major wrongdoings. They focus on factors such as law, economics, and international relations, as well as on elements such as emotions and ethics, culture and religion, media and education. Reconciliation research therefore requires a transdisciplinary approach, to analyse both the procedures leading to the recognition of truth as well as those in which justice is administered; both the impact of public apologies and cooperation agreements; both the implementation of memory policies and civil society initiatives; both the outcomes of trauma therapy and intergenerational encounter groups. While on the surface the relationships in question are those between states, groups, organisations, and individuals, at a deeper level reconciliation always addresses and involves many axes of damaged relationships: those with others (intergroup); those with one's own group (intragroup); those with oneself; those with the environment; and those with transcendence. Reconciliation studies deal, therefore, with a much broader spectrum of relationships than that taken into consideration by neighbouring disciplines such as conflict resolution and peace studies. In this volume, Francesco Ferrari and Davide Tacchini brought together examples of Leiner's approach to reconciliation studies as a cooperative project of different disciplines. The articles are divided into two sections: 1. A series of case studies about Japan-South Korea relations, German-Czech reconciliation, Nagorno-Karabakh conflict using the methods of Martin Leiner, Sayyid Qutb view of American society, and South Africans revisiting TRC. 2. A series of theoretical clarifications on reconciliation and moderation from a Palestinian point of view, evolutionary game theory looking at reconciliation processes by a team of economists, grace and reconciliation from a Catholic theological point of view, philosophical reflections on the concept of reconciliation after Auschwitz, cognitive and affective aspects in reconciliation from a Catholic theological point of view, ecology and spatiality of reconciliation seen by a social geographer, and political dimensions of reconciliation.

The purpose of this book is simply to share ten months of conversations toward an integral friendship. It is not to define or to illustrate what an Integral friendship between a woman and a man is, because I believe no one yet really knows what would comprise such a friendship. Our purpose is simply to share a year of e-mail exchanges between Head (who apparently experiences life primarily through her intellectual center, her head) and Heart (who apparently experiences life primarily through his emotional center, his heart).

This volume illustrates how theatre arts can be used to enact peace education by showcasing the use of theatrical techniques including storytelling, testimonial and forum theatre, political humor, and arts-based pedagogy in diverse formal and non-formal educational contexts across age groups. The text presents and discusses how the use of applied theatre, especially in conflict-affected areas, can be used as an educational response to cultural and structural violence for transformation of relations, healing, and praxis as local and global peacebuilding. Crucially, it bridges performing arts and peace education, the latter of which is unfolding in schools and their communities worldwide. With contributors from countries including Northern Ireland, Denmark, Norway, the USA, Mexico, Japan, the Philippines, Pakistan, Burundi, Kenya, and South Africa, the authors identify theoretical and technical aspects of theatrical performance that support peace through transformation along with embodied and sensorial learning. This book will appeal to scholars and students with interests in teacher education, arts-based learning, peace studies, and applied theatre that consider practice with child, adolescent, and adult learners.

Adham Hamed explores how a metaphoric understanding of the Middle East as an open space full of resonating sound bodies can be applied to the Middle East Conflict. Through inquiring into the experienced truths of large-scale political violence, the author suggests that music carries a potential for speaking ‘unspeakable’ truths. He explores hidden layers by applying the transrational approach to peace studies and proposes a non-territorial understanding of conflict. Hamed argues that security and justice discourses make up the dominant primary themes in this context. The Jerusalem Youth Chorus and the Egyptian band Eskenderella are examined as case studies. This book uncovers where their truths meet within and beyond the restrictions of formalized language. The author concludes that in moments of experienced resonance there is potential for change in the dynamics of rigid conflicts.