The importance of post-conflict socio-cultural community education programmes: a case study from northern Uganda

Using data from a programme in northern Uganda, this article argues psycho-social education supports post-conflict reconstruction better than humanitarian aid or materialistically-focused projects. The programme used post-Freirian, discovery-based pedagogies focusing on topics chosen by participants: family and community relations, gender power relations, education, forced sex, and reintegration of rebel fighters. It worked for a year with groups of men, women, male and female youths, its major focus being on deconstructing local gender identities. The programme’s impact was considerable: greater egalitarianism within families along with warmer relationships, increased community integration, significantly reduced levels of violence, and greater responsibility in sexual relations. Improved economic well-being was a tangential additional benefit. I suggest this approach can significantly reduce the likelihood of future conflict. This has important implications for the international community to consider when drawing up policies for support in post-conflict settings. More attention needs to be given to grass-roots work rather than macro-level interventions as the former can be far more efficacious and even prevent populations following radical leaders. Thus in the long-term it is also more cost-effective, although this clashes with contemporary neoliberal ideology

EDITORIAL: Aesthetics and participation …

Does it ever happen that a theoretical perspective is articulated, accepted and then sealed from further debate? There is a process of development, application, critique and assessment. Among other things, scholarly journals offer their communities of readers and writers a space for continuing debate about the implications of concepts and conversations

Frank Roche – fiddler, dancer, and music collector : a musical life in turn-of-the-twentieth-century rural Ireland

Publisher PD

Paralympic cultures: disability as paradigm

This is an article about the Paralympic Games of summer 2012 and the experience of watching them. It rehearses the use of disability as political and cultural identity in relation to theatre and performance studies. Disability identity is not an identity based on similitude, but is a complex and nuanced relationship between singularity of embodied social experience and glimmers of common ground. Taking the works of Rod Michalko and Petra Kuppers as a representative foundation of disability studies, the article offers disability as an epistemological standpoint, a way of thinking, and not an object of thought. The argument works through close readings of three examples to introduce the theatre and performance studies reader to the notion of disability as a paradigm for the consideration of ideas of difference, similitude and identity. The process of reading the Paralympics from the perspective of a disabled person, bike riding sports fan and disability performance scholar gestures to the scope and potential of disability performance studies. The article accumulates three examples of one disabled person navigating a complex set of positions, all of which are iterations of disability. Whilst this critical approach might imply solipsism, the article also considers disability as community

The silent witness : the fiddle manuscripts of John ‘Boss’ Murphy (1875–1955)

Publisher PD

A topological definition of the Maslov bundle

We give a definition of the Maslov fibre bundle for a lagrangian submanifold of the cotangent bundle of a smooth manofold. This definition generelizes the definition given, in homotopic terms, by Arnol'd for lagrangian submanifolds of the cotangent bundle of the euclidean space and coincides with the one of H\"{o}rmander in his works about Fourier Inegral Operators

What Can Applying a Gender Lens Contribute to Conflict Studies? A review of selected MICROCON1 working papers

It is rare to find gender a specific focus of scholarship on conflict studies. In MICROCON we have tried to place gender in a central position within all projects and to convince all researchers to use a gender lens for their analysis. This paper uses a set of MICROCON working papers to illustrate how gender can be used at different conceptual levels in conflict analysis, and aims to show what can be gained by the use of a gender lens. The papers bear out Enloe’s insistence that those seeking an in-depth understanding of the social and political world require a feminist curiosity – that is, a curiosity about the roles gender categories play in political debate and action, as well as in scholarship.