Self, Eco-relationality and Peace Pedagogy: Lessons and Challenges from Wisdom Traditions ~ A Dialogue.

As peace and peace education struggle in a climate of existential threats we worry that current onto-epistemologies are insufficient to truly influence sustainable change. Instead, we fear existing pedagogies of peace only become co-opted into reproducing the dominant cultural system, which is based upon problematic notions of individuality, human-centrism, competition and violence. As peace educators and scholars we ask whether alternative onto-epistemological framings of peace could offer ways beyond our current predicaments and genuinely affect how we interact with each other and the other-than-human world. In particular, we wish to explore our own experiences working with what we will define as Wisdom-informed traditions; approaches that respectfully borrow from worldviews outside of the Western Modernist mindset. These perspectives encompass transpersonal notions of Self as interdependent and interrelational with the world around us. We believe such perspectives align with, and in some cases even predate, decolonial and philosophical critiques of peace education, offering specific methodologies that could transform our ways of being away from current Neoliberal framings towards more ecologically-centric and relational sensibilities. To discuss such perspectives, we wish to invite you the reader into dialogue with us to further destabilize the production of knowledge symptomatic with the current onto-epistemologies we seek divergence from. We therefore invite you into a diasporic co-poesis and diffractive dialogue about how Wisdom-informed traditions both challenge and inspire pedagogies of peace whilst reaffirming the central importance of an integrated Self and eco-relationality

Historicizing the Freedom of Expression and Dissent at Dartmouth College

For decades since the 1960s, student-led movements on college campuses have spearheaded political change across the nation. At the same time, college administrations have developed a web of speech and conduct policies, adorned with increasingly hefty specifications for permissible campus protest. This article studies the origins and developments of one such set of policies at Dartmouth College, including the Freedom of Expression and Dissent (FED) policy and its associated conduct regulations. These policies found their genesis in three pivotal periods of protest at Dartmouth: the George Wallace protests of the early to mid-1960s, the anti-Vietnam war movement in the late 1960s, and the anti-apartheid protests of the mid- to late 1980s. Through analyzing the historical causes, revisions, and applications of the FED policy and its associated conduct regulations, I argue that these policies were developed not to protect free expression and dissent, but to prevent such expression from disrupting the college administration’s desired social order. The FED policy serves the counterinsurgent function of symbolically affirming free expression and dissent, while its accompanying conduct regulations work in conjunction to control dissent’s impactfulness

The Road Less Travelled: L.L. Nunn and the Birth of the Nunnian Microcollege

This paper examines the historical roots of the microcollege movement focusing on the establishment of the first microcollege institutions: the Telluride Institute (1891), the Telluride Association (1910), and the Deep Springs College (1917). These microcollege-type institutions were founded by the eccentric Gilded Age energy tycoon L.L. Nunn. While Nunn’s educational ventures often reflected broad trends in higher education at the time, his core educational principles evolved over his career. This paper argues that the concurrent application of Nunn’s four primary principles of education (self-government, intellectual and academic rigor, physical work, and societal isolation), which evolved gradually to receive full expression at Deep Springs College, represents not only a divergence from higher education trends of the time, but also provides an opportunity for scholars of higher education today to reconsider the fundamental principles of higher education in a modern democratic setting

The Pervasion of Sexism in Psychiatry

Essay Prompt: In the year 2023, the historical impact of bias and sexism on the perception of mental illness is still present in our culture in the United States and world-wide. The passages above may be viewed through that lens, in that Freud and other early psychiatrists tended to blame everything on the mother/woman. Using examples from the passage above, class interviews, optional reading, and/or your own experiences, please write an essay focused on some type of bias (gender, racial, economic, etc) in mental health. Ideas for areas of interest to discuss may be beliefs, perceptions, access to treatment, or consequences of such bias.&nbsp