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Peyman Vahabzadeh, "Violence and Nonviolence: Conceptual Excursions into Phantom Opposites."
No full textYouth Conceptualization of Resilience Strategies in Four Low- and Middle-Income Countries
No full textThe concept of resilience is increasingly influential in the development of interventions and services for young people, yet there is limited knowledge of how resilience-building strategies are conceptualized by young people across different cultures, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. The aim of this study was to capture 274 young people’s voices in disadvantaged communities in Kenya, Turkey, Pakistan, and Brazil through participatory research methods. Young people defined strategies in response to 4 adversity scenarios reflecting socioecological systems (young person, family, school, and community). Template analysis, underpinned by thematic design, was used to establish three broad themes of intrapersonal (self-management, cognitive re-appraisal, agency), interpersonal (social engagement, informal supports, formal supports), and religious resources. Proposed strategies were largely similar across the sites, with some contextual differences depending on the scenario (stressor) and cultural group. The findings support an ecological systems approach to resilience, which is consistent with the development of multimodal interventions for vulnerable youth and their families in disadvantaged communities in low- and middle-income countries
A Perspective on Identity and Conflict: The Ba’athist State’s Sectarianizing Imperatives in Syria
No full textWith the outbreak of conflict in 2011, the Syrian predicament became of great interest not only to the actors and people directly affected, but also to a global audience that mostly understands the region from a reductionist, essentialist perspective. While acknowledging elements of this conflict had sectarian undertones, this paper departs from popular civilizational discourse that seeks to paint the MENA in sectarian terms. By exploring the role Bashar Al-Assad’s government played in “sectarianizing” the Syrian conflict, this analysis will look at the ways in which Bashar’s government engages with actors across confessional divides in some instances, and shores up sectarian tensions in others. I argue that the Syrianstate implicitly demonstrates that cleavages need to be exploited, and sects mobilized, and that MENA conflict is not inherently about asserting sectarian primacy. Taking guidance from the theoretical framework laid out by Danny Postel and Nader Hashemi, I argue the Syrian state’s sectarianizing and self-preservationist behaviour, is reflective of a regional power struggle and political preservation. Instead, Syrian civil society in 2011 overwhelmingly represented notions of political empowerment, reform, and agency, and not agitation to worsen existing sectarian cleavages
The Hall of Mirrors and A Landscape of Multiple Layer: Insurgent Research, Indigenous Resurgence, and Challenging the University Structure
No full textThe space created within the “hall of mirrors” that is university organizes knowing into constituent parts, isolating them from their connections until something is knowing intricately yet individually. This paradigm has begun increasingly to draw Indigenous academics and scholarship into its silos where the ways of knowing those academics bring are to be pulled apart and explored, enfranchised within the colonial system until they themselves are colonized. My paper explores how the fundamental basis for knowing in many Indigenous worldviews, relationship, is capable of undermining this pulling apart, creating a resurgent space within the university structure that is counter to the colonial paradigm that informs learning within
"With Their Light Footsteps Press": Edward Thomas, W.B. Yeats, and the Symbolism of Loss
No full textEqually indebted to a pastoral tradition thatprojected the poet’s emotional interiority onto the naturalworld, W.B. Yeats’s and Edward Thomas’s nature poems relyon an affective symbolism. For Thomas, however, whose poetic landscapes are never wholly removed from his participation in WWI, there arises a contradiction between the Romantics’ transcendent mode and the psychological realitiesof war. Focusing on how two of his pastoral poems, “Roads”and “February Afternoon,” address symbolic and formal oppositions, this paper posits that Thomas reconfigures hissymbolism to accommodate both spiritual absence and human loss, resolving the antinomy of transcendent vision andtraumatic experience
A Youthful Julius Caesar Experiment
No full textA co-authored review of the Greater Victoria Shakespeare Festival\u27s 2019 production of Julius Caesar. 
Creating Connections to Land through Art: Allowing Curiosity to Take the Lead in Urban Spaces
No full textWhen a child requested a visit to a colourful metal tree that she had seen on the way to the children’s centre, we had no idea it would spark a journey of connection to the land through the art found in a bustling, urban, downtown setting. This article describes our journey as educators as we used questions to guide and push forward our practice with children. The questions provoked both children and educators to notice connections to the environment and how we might learn more about ourselves and the histories and stories of our surroundings. The purpose of this article is to consider how a series of metal tree art installations called our attention to the land we are on and the pedagogical possibilities that arose when we listened to questions proposed by both educators and the children in our care
A Critique of a Child-Centered Curriculum
No full textImagine a world full of human beings existing to and for themselves alone, insensitive and removed from the social and natural world. Here we contemplate child-centeredness, a discourse used liberally in the realm of early childhood education and yet rarely considered critically. Drawing from Gert Biesta, we will explore the ways in which the notion of a child-centred curriculum positions the child as an egological being and thus minimizes the child’s relationships with others and the world in which they exist. We hope to provoke considerations of how we might reconceptualize curricula to foster children’s understanding of their broader existence
