Nourishing the Fields: The Role of Transformative Agency and Dignity as Groundwork for Educating for Peace, Justice, and Human Rights

• In Event: New Directions in Critical Peace and Human Rights Education: Centering Transformative Agency, Dignity and Decoloniality in Theory, Praxis, and Scholarship

Proposal

In this paper, we posit that transformative agency and dignity form part of the same soil that nourishes the related fields of peace education and human rights education in their most critical forms, and that these concepts mutually form part of the groundwork to justice-based, liberatory educational efforts generally. We consider the ways in which peace education and human rights education converge, intersect, and diverge, drawing from empirical and conceptual research across the globe that we have carried out and literature we have reviewed systematically. By understanding the fertile terrain in which the fields overlap–and delving specifically into the areas of transformative agency and dignity that underpin various projects of liberatory education– keen new theoretical insights and framings can emerge. We present in this paper an heuristic as well of the concept we have developed of a “possibility tree” that complements the “problem tree” framework posited by Paulo Freire for analyzing social conditions and the roots of direct and structural violence (Galtung, 1969). In this paper, we will discuss this work and present the key tenets of the possibility tree as a useful tool in peace education research and praxis. Linking to the need for decolonial approaches to peace and human rights education and the trajectory of the fields in this direction–as exemplified by the other 4 papers in this session–this paper provides some shared language and frameworks for how such trends in the fields of peace and human rights education can advance justice and equity and counter the Eurocentric traditions of the fields as well.

Authors

• Monisha Bajaj, University of San Francisco

• Maria Hantzopoulos, Vassar College