Free to Be: One Charter School\u27s Approach to Supporting Gender and Sexual Minority Students

This dissertation presents three and a half years of ethnographic data from an “LGBT” charter school. It explores how gender and sexuality appear within educational spaces and how providing students an anti-heteronormative inclusive education impacts a student’s sense of self. I show how critical pedagogy is deployed as an anti-heteronormative approach to supporting all students. The term anti-heteronormative is used to express an explicit rejection of heterosexism and genderism, acknowledging the complex oppressive factors that develop given the normative expectations of gender and sexuality and the impact such expectations have on all bodies and all students. Findings reveal how the juxtaposition of the inclusive space provided by the school and the heteronormative expectations of the outside world collide in complex ways for students. Bullying and challenges to inclusion persist. Critical pedagogy serves to help students assess the meaning bullying has for themselves and others. Likewise the critical pedagogy of the school supports a flexible curriculum and informal spaces that provide students opportunities to explore how they want heteronormativity to impact their lives. The anti-heteronormative approach of the school leads some students to find new ways of being – literally, new ways to exist – in the world

International mediation in Northern Ireland: an analysis of the influence of international intermediaries on the process and the outcome of the Northern Irish peace process from 1994 to mid-2004

"The study of international mediation has received a lot of attention in recent political science. However, the main focus appears to lie on case studies dealing with the role of international intermediaries in conflicts between state. Less research seems to exist in the field of intra-national conflicts. The following article will deal with the role of international mediators in the Northern Ireland peace process during the ten years before mid-2004. It will examine whether international actors could foster perceptional de-escalation, or rather a 'de-escalation of minds' among the internal political conflict parties, rather than simply contributing to structural changes, e.g. a re-organisation of the inter-party relationship in the form of the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. Such a potential perceptional de-escalation would be crucial in order for structural changes to remain stable. Otherwise, it could be very likely that positive structural changes might be destroyed once again due to renewed escalation on the subjective level of conflict. The empirical analysis will be conducted by using a newly developed combination of Werner Link's concept of conflict, a modified escalation model based on the works of the authors Fisher and Keashly and of Jacob Bercovitch's 'contingency model' of international mediation. In line with this theoretical framework, the mediation efforts in Northern Ireland and their effects on the conflict parties' perceptions will be at the centre of a qulitative empirical case study. In the case of the internal conflict parties, a substantial speech analysis will show how the parties' perceptions, specifically their perceived interests, have changed on an escalation scale ranging from I to IV. In the case of the international mediators, the strategies used in the same period were put under closer scrutiny by conducting both a speech and an event analysis. The combined data will show whether or not international mediators did have a significant impact on the conflict parties' percptions and what implications this might have for international mediation in intra-national conflict situations." (author's abstract

Tussen denken en doen

Rede, In verkorte vorm uitgesproken ter gelegenheid van het aanvaarden van het ambt van bijzonder hoogleraar met als leeropdracht Experimentele Neurochirurgische Oncologie aan het Erasmus MC, faculteit van de Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam op 5 maart 201