Term Papers (thankfully in a completed and turned in state)

I'm finally starting to get excited about the Christmas festivities and focusing on my sisters and their husband and boyfriend coming to Derry this week. The turned in and completed state of my term papers as of 10:15 a.m. on this very day has a large part to do with that. Freedom!

So, after thousands of pages read and hours upon hours of compiling...el finito! I have had some very interesting conversations in the past month or so surrounding these topics and if you are in any way interested, I will be happy to send the pdf. versions to you, although in truth, the bibliographies will likely be more useful! And, by the way, does anyone know how to post PDF's to a blog?

The are the titles and introductions to my work this term.

Nonviolence: Challenging Negative Perceptions and Exploring Future Possibilities

War is not a biological necessity, but rather a social invention, according to the Seville Statement on Violence issued in 1986 by the social and biological scientists at the UNESCO conference in Seville, Spain. Nor is war inherent to the human species, according to psychologist Steven Kull (1984, p.55). Berger and Luukman (1971) argue that all social knowledge and institutions (including warfare) are a social construction. A study done in the 1940’s by Sorokin concluded that war in itself was not inevitable, but was becoming more lethal over time. (cited in Boulding E., 2000, p. 26). Yet individuals and nation states still participate in war, political violence, and destructive conflict with the belief or assumption that violence presents the only viable option to achieving an end.

Nonviolence and peaceful cultures have existed for millennia in every continent and continue to challenge the accepted view that violence and war are biologically, socially or politically inevitable. Nonviolent action can be a powerful and effective practice for eliciting positive social and political change. The focus of this paper is to identify negative perceptions about nonviolence, address the lack of historical education about nonviolence, and pose general practices for a nonviolent campaign.

For the purpose of clarifying vague terms, nonviolence and nonviolent direct action in this paper are meant to imply the vigorous commitment to “peace by peaceful means” as defined by Galtung and popularly attributed to Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., but are not meant to imply (or exclude) a moral and religious imperative. The concept of peace in this paper exceeds the definition of simply the absence of violence, but should be considered to be “nonviolent and creative conflict transformation” (Galtung, 1996, p. 9) with an emphasis on building and preserving political, economic, and social rights . The words success and failure typically refer to whether or not the explicit goals of the resistant group (violent or nonviolent) were met. Although this strict and dichotomous definition does not recognize that partial successes and failures are present in every violent and nonviolent conflict, success and failure will be regarded as either principally achieving or failing to reach the defined goal of the struggle.

*As a little tid-bit for the Pennsylvania crowd, did you know that our state was an experiment in nonviolence initially, one of the only communities to establish working and friendly relationships with the Native American population? Or that it was NOT named for William Penn (a Quaker) as we are taught in school, but rather for his father who was the accomplished and celebrated Sir Admiral William Penn?

Storytelling: A Bottom-up approach to truth-recovery and social change in Northern Ireland

The ancient practice of storytelling engages both the teller and the listener in a dialogue that creates a space to understand or imagine different facets of life. Modern Western thought traditionally revered scientific thought as the ultimate form of valid knowledge but regarded storytelling and other experiences that involve emotions, creativity or imagination with little academic, business, or psychological utility. However, stories are increasingly used in the improvement of collaborative relationships in organizations as well as psychotherapy (Garcia-Lorenzo, Nolas, and de Zeeuw, 2008, and Hibbert, McInnes, and Huxham, 2008) and in post-conflict truth recovery and social change processes. This paper seeks to address the reasons why storytelling is a beneficial bottom-up truth recovery process, identify different types of storytelling initiatives in Northern Ireland, provide basic storytelling methodologies, address broad challenges and explore ways that storytelling can create a new narrative for future generations.

In the post-violent era of conflict in Northern Ireland, ushered in by the Belfast Agreement of 1998, storytelling has been recognized as an effective bottom-up approach to truth recovery, healing, reconciliation, historical record, and dealing with the past . Janet Senehi (2002, p. 54) claims that through stories, we visit, interpret, mourn and treasure the past. Storytelling is a process in which memory and truth are expressed, heard, and recorded and individual and collective awareness is uncovered. Such claims are legitimized as both academics and local citizens recognize that stories “tell us not only who we are but who we have been and where we should be” (Rappaport, 2000, p. 796). As society continues to confront the vestiges of protracted violent conflict by creating new narratives about what happened and continues to happen in Northern Ireland, “it is very clear that these stories not only exist but they have powerful effects on human behavior.” (Rappaport, 1995, p. 796) With proper methodology processes in place and support from the local community, storytelling can be a very meaningful and significant bottom-up truth recovery process and agent for social change.



So....a thesis topic? Still contemplating my options...but after Christmas! For now, I am off to my host Rotary club's Christmas lunch.