College of Saint Benedict and Saint John's University
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Everyday Peace: Historicising Local Agency in Managing Ethno-Religious Conflicts in Nigeria’s Middle Belt
Get PDFOver the years, critical studies scholars have criticised liberal peacebuilding strategies for their elitist top-down policies, which hardly pay attention to the local concepts and acts of peace. Critical peace and conflict studies scholars’ advocacy for ‘everyday peace’ comes from negotiated governance, where loosely coordinated processes surpass liberal peace\u27s top-down policies. Therefore, everyday peace recognises people\u27s commentaries and practices shaping their resistance, resilience, and negotiation with conflicting groups. In particular, women and people far from city centres are often marginalised or are not included in peacebuilding efforts. In recognising these people’s limited involvement, this article draws on oral interviews, archival materials, and secondary data with conflict-affected people in some selected study areas in Nigeria’s Middle Belt to understand the dynamics of everyday peace practices. The findings highlight that people in these conflict-affected areas use everyday peace as the hidden script where acts of avoidance, domination, and resistance occur. Naturally, everyday peace has been criticised for emphasising conflict management over resolution. However, this article argues that everyday peace should be examined through the lens of innovation, creativity, and improvision, where citizen agency at the individual and group level takes precedence over state-mandated conflict resolution processes
Unconventional Avenues for Public Participation: A Case Study from Rural Egypt
Get PDFWhen traditional avenues for learning and participation become inaccessible for less-advantaged people to learn and participate, people tend to develop other unconventional avenues to learn and participate in decisions that affect their lives. There are two distinct research approaches in the study of political participation. One approach, which had been historically predominant, focuses on individual characteristics such as education level, income and class, and the other, social network approach focuses on the influence of context and social networks in the political socialization and mobilization of men and women in democracies and authoritarian polities. This paper fits into the second approach and makes a contribution to it. The paper turns the focus of public participation away from classical, formal Tocquevillian understandings to the unconventional avenues of participation that have remained outside of the scope of some research. It examines how young women in authoritarian contexts utilize self-created social networks as unconventional avenues to learn and advance their political participation. It uniquely places the question of the pedagogical and political consequences of social capital into an analysis of women’s social interactions within social networks.
Utilizing constructivist qualitative research conducted in three rural villages in Egypt, this study penetrates disadvantaged women’s realities and capture their unique forms of political participation and sets the groundwork for future study to examine political participation beyond the conventional civic and political activities aimed at marginalized groups in developing democracies around the globe
Carolyn Forché Craft Talk
No full textForché will discuss her writing process and take questions from the audience.
Renowned as a poet of witness, Carolyn Forché is the author of five books of poetry. Forché\u27s first volume, Gathering the Tribes, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, was followed by The Country Between Us, The Angel of History, and Blue Hour. Her most recent collection is In the Lateness of the World. She is also the author of the memoir What You Have Heard is True (Penguin Random House, 2019), a devastating, lyrical, and visionary memoir about a young woman\u27s brave choice to engage with horror in order to help others, which was nominated for the 2019 National Book Awards. She has translated Mahmoud Darwish, Claribel Alegria, and Robert Desnos. Her famed international anthology, Against Forgetting, has been praised by Nelson Mandela as itself a blow against tyranny, against prejudice, against injustice, and is followed by the 2014 anthology The Poetry of Witness. In 1998 in Stockholm, she received the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation for Peace and Culture Award for her human rights advocacy and the preservation of memory and culture
Spotlight on Brazil Series - An Informal Conversation on Racial Issues & Basketball in Brazil
No full textAn informal conversation on racial issues & basketball in Brazil with Jamir Garcez, engineer, former professional basketball player and writer
Spotlight on Brazil Series - Fernando Conceição: Violence Against Minorities - Brazil & US
No full textInternational Cooperation and the Killing of Black Bodies: A Comparison of Brazil and the United State with Dr. Fernando Costa da Conceição
Reclaiming Rights to the Rites of the Anointing
Get PDFThis submission is a paper written in response to the discussion of Jesus’ healing ministry restoring ethnomedical health of a community through healing particular individuals thus representing the need to reintegrate the marginalized within the body of the community and the utilization of the Rite of the Anointing as a communal sacrament to renegotiate the individual in the community amid circumstances contributing to the migration to the periphery creating discord and illness. I have used the diverse and global impact of the pandemic to illuminate imbalanced health of communities and the urgency with which we must respond through sacramental theology
The Church in the Modern Context
Get PDFThis paper on the Church in the Modern Context brings into conversation the goals of Vatican I, Vatican II, and those of Pope Francis in today’s modern context. It seeks to understand the context of the councils and where Pope Francis seeks to lead the Church today, especially one that resembles a field hospital
Everyone Wants a Revolution, No One Wants to Do the Dishes
Get PDFThis piece is a reflection on climate despair, filtered through the novel A Canticle for Leibowitz, the Catholic Worker Movement, and Benedictine spirituality to imagine what the response of a faithful Catholic might be. It posits that the only adequate response to, seemingly, insurmountable challenges is to hope against hope
Cushion Sea Stars (Oreaster reticulatus) have the Ability to Respond to Disturbance
Get PDFWe were interested in the distance of movement among cushion sea stars (Oreaster reticulatus) located in Graham’s Harbor, San Salvador, Bahamas. We hypothesized that there is a difference in distance moved when the starfish are under disturbed conditions as compared to undisturbed conditions. Based on our hypothesis, we predicted that the starfish move further when disturbed in comparison to when they have not been disturbed. The data was collected through six trials, over the course of three days (9-11 March, 2022). For the disturbed environment, we collected the starfish and placed them in a central location. From there, we measured the distance moved after one hour. For the undisturbed environment, we found the starfish in their original location, marked the location, and measured the distance moved after one hour. Distance moved was significantly different (t = 3.46, df = 11, p=0.005) between disturbed (M = 22.89, SD = 24.95) and undisturbed (M = 0.328, SD = 0.979). Statistical analysis suggests that we accept our hypothesis. These results suggest that sea stars have the ability to determine a change in their environment. Overall, this research contributes to the general knowledge regarding the behavior of cushion sea stars, as well as individual preferences of the sea stars