Social Sciences Hub
Date: Tuesday 13 May 2025 - Thursday 15 May 2025
Time: 09:00 - 17:00
Venue: Advanced Research Centre, 11 Chapel Ln, Glasgow G11 6EW
Category: Conferences, Exhibitions, Public lectures, Academic events, Student events, Alumni events, Sanctuary
Speaker: More than 50 speakers from all over the world

This year the UNESCO RIELA Spring School focuses on peacebuilding, specifically using arts, languages and education. For 2025, we have curated a programme which explores how to build peace in the minds of people, how to live together peacefully, restoratively and interculturally, how to respond to and counteract current events worldwide that seek to divide societies, and how to ensure that peace prevails, founded on justice.

In so doing we acknowledge that to even contemplate peace when colleagues and friends in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and especially in Gaza, Sudan, Tigray, Ukraine and Lebanon (full list of armed conflicts available here) are experiencing genocide and war crimes of the most horrifying nature is, in itself, a luxury. We are seeing many of the international agreements and conventions which bind our work in the UNESCO Chair, at the University of Glasgow, in shreds and our own critical discussions mean that we have lost much faith, even the little we may have had, in peace-building initiatives. We see our work at present as requiring a degree of resignation from the violent structures which have now comprehensively failed. To work alongside those who should have been offered international refugee protection such that their lives and the conditions for their dignity and life might have been restored is now very much our urgent task. But how to do this when we are grieving tangible and intangible losses on so many levels? What sustains the work of peacebuilding and conflict transformation when language fails, when art is mourning, when grief is raw and critical capacities struggle to make any sense of the world?

And yet – this is our task as people of intellect. And study. And Art. And education. So, what might we say when words fail, when resignation is a necessary task, when forms which held hope no longer exist or are themselves destituted of all power?

Come and think this through with us.

Sub-topics we will be looking at:

  • Non-violent strategies to prevent hatred, wars, and violent conflicts, we are especially interested in strategies that include languages and/or arts.
  • Examples by community groups/organisations where peacebuilding is part of the integration methodology: what are the difficulties and best practices?
  • Researching “peacebuilding”, how to deal with research-related issues (access to conflict areas, cultural representation, story extraction etc.).
  • Educating the next generation of peacebuilders: bearing witness and passing on knowledge, approaches to integrate peacebuilding and conflict resolution into school curricula.
  • When peace is not your daily reality, what can be done? Methods for using art to preserve the socio-cultural memory of people affected by conflict and to support mental health.
  • Strategies for creating spaces for reconciliation and dialogue, creative art approaches to facilitate healing in post-conflict societies.
  • Critical perspectives on liberal peacebuilding, on securitisation and theoretical models, routed in praxis, for enabling peace to prevail, perspectives from people with lived experience of conflict and persecution.

PROGRAMME

Keynote speakers

  • The Allanton Peace Sanctuary
  • Professor David Gramling
  • Professor Jen Ang
  • Professor Alison Phipps
  • Professor Jo Beall
  • Professor Vivienne Anderson

Keynote listeners

  • Lina Fadel
  • Kaz Reeves
  • Irineu Destourelles

Presenters

  • Museum of Ukrainian Craft and Culture Scotland (MUCCS) - The Things They Carried
  • Nataliia Yanishevska - Petrykivka Decorative Painting Workshop
  • Tom Block - Readers Theatre of Oud Player on the Tel
  • Timothy Peacock & Rebecca Sutton - Peacegaming Workshop: Co-Creating Games to Explore Peacebuilding
  • Dr Tesfalem Yemane & Dr Hyab Yohannes - Reclaiming our Words of Peacefulness: A Conversation between Hyab Yohannes and Tesfalem Yemane
  • Sundas Mahar - Environmental Literacies for Peacebuilding
  • Seif Jlassi - El Rboukh: Dance as a pathway for societal peace
  • Sarah Stewart - Piecebuilding: the Spring School book of letting go and holding on
  • Samira Hassanzade, Dilara Özel Sen & Sevinj Rustamova - Beyond Words: Silent Paths to Peace
  • Sadia Sikandar - Meraki
  • René Landspersky - Listen
  • Rachel Morley & Lucy Cathcart Frödén - Peace Bench: Strengthening stories of peace
  • Rachel Burke - Piecing it together: creative approaches to researching language learner experiences of peace and healing in displacement and resettlement
  • Pinar Aksu - Cycle of Peace
  • Nina Baratti - Soundscapes of Peace: Creative Dialogue and Healing through a Sound Collection
  • Meg Wroe, Kaz Reeves, Patricia Livingstone & Catriona Robertson - Fingerprint Labyrinth on the Right to Non-Violent Protest
  • Mallory Hybl & Heather Zajac - Peer Mediation in Education: Equipping Young People with Conflict Resolution Skills for Life
  • Marta Adamowicz & Robert Motyka - Folktales for New Scots
  • Mark Maughan - Revisiting Roger Casement in the Amazon: Co-created Narratives from the Past for Peacebuilding in the Present
  • Luke "Ray" di Marco Campbell & others - Collective Action for Sustenance and Shelter: Locally-organised Solutions for Immediate and Long Terms Needs
  • Lina Fadel & Jo Drugan - Silence for Peace: Reimagining Research Methodologies in Contexts of Displacement
  • Kirsten Adkins - Borderlands: archiving memory, belonging and displacement
  • Julie Ward - Linking up the local & global - an example that uses arts & creativity from the No To Hassockfield campaign
  • Jasmín Amada Díaz Vázquez - Citizen alliances between Mexico and United Kingdom for Peacebuilding
  • Hope Wang - ‘You can’t fight for water’: Heritage Education as Pathway to Peace
  • Erdem Avşar - Good News
  • Dilara Özel Sen - Listening Within: Trauma-Informed Tools for Peace and Dialogue
  • Ellis Brooks - Nukes on the Clyde: exploring the theme of nuclear weapons through the global and the local
  • Claire Chalmers & Jehan Al-Azzawi - We need peace in the world - what role for educators?
  • Christina Kyriakidou & participants of the CWIN art group - A Collective Vision of Peace: A 10-Metre Collaborative Painting
  • Cheng Hui Liu & Diana Cruz - The Flow of Colour: Encountering Inner Emotions and Rationality
  • Catriona Robertson - Journey of Hope: skills for bringing people with different perspectives together
  • Catrin Evans - We Are A Peaceful People
  • CarolAnne Duncan - Education for Peace in the Primary school
  • Brice Catherin & Mukuka Kasonde - Solving diversity
  • Avril Bellinger & Viv Horton - Growing Peace
  • Anja M.C. Schönau (Fine Artist) - Beyond daisies, cornflower and buttercup. Provoking – Remembering - Reframing
  • Aisha Abbas - Building bridges with laughter and empathy: equipping the next generation of peace builders

For more information about previous Spring Schools or the UNESCO RIELA project, please click here.

If you have trouble accessing any of the links on this page, please email Bella at unesco-riela@glasgow.ac.uk

More information