Narrative

Mason students map the Russia-Ukraine war through personal stories

Mariam Aburdeineh — Mon, 09 May 2022 17:17:45 +0000

Mason students map the Russia-Ukraine war through personal stories Mariam Aburdeineh Mon, 05/09/2022 - 13:17

In This Story

Learn more about the Carter School

Despite being more than 5,000 miles away from the war in Ukraine, students at George Mason University’s Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution are actively assessing the conflict dynamics, with hopes that their research could improve the situation.

Keil Eggers is part of a team at George Mason University that is digitally mapping the Ukraine-Russia war.

“A lot of students in [Solon Simmons’ Peace Engineering and Participatory Approaches to Narrative] class felt it would be important to do what we could locally with our set of methods and tools to try and help,” said Keil Eggers, Peace Engineering Lab manager and Carter School PhD student.

They’re creating a digital map of the war through peoples’ lived experiences.

Mapping the Conflict

The team, which includes faculty and seven students ranging from the undergraduate to PhD levels, is creating this map using SenseMaker, a program that allows for a large-scale collection of narratives.

Their SenseMaking in Ukraine project asks participants—ranging from U.S. citizens to those impacted on the ground in Ukraine and Russia—to answer one of three prompts. Responses can be submitted in English, Ukrainian or Russian:

How can ordinary people support peace in Ukraine? Share one of your lived experiences that shows how help can be given or how it has been blocked.
Start a conversation: Tell us one of your lived experiences that you would want people who are on the other side to hear.
What have you noticed about the conflict in Ukraine that makes you hopeful or concerned about a peaceful future

A unique aspect of SenseMaker is that participants evaluate their submissions through questions, including a series of triangles, where each point represents an opinion.

SenseMaker Triangle showing where participants placed their answer among the three choices within the triangle.

For the question, “The situation will improve when people…,” the points represent:

Thoughtfully react to the needs of the present
Overcome historical divides
Achieve security over the long term

“By placing their dot as a balance between one of those factors, you get quantitative data for each person’s story,” Eggers said, adding that Mason students designed the survey questions and will support the data analysis.

The data will help uncover patterns, he said, and will become part of a public dashboard the team is creating to support understanding and next steps.

Impacting Change

This is the first time the school has used SenseMaker in an active conflict, Eggers said. The class hopes to influence change by hosting workshops about the narratives.

“Most of the time in those stories, you start to ask people, ‘What can you do tomorrow to create more stories like ones you want to see and fewer stories like the ones you don’t,’” Eggers said, quoting SenseMaker thought leader Dave Snowden.

“You get people directly thinking about what they can do in their own lives, whether that’s giving aid, doing some kind of really local small action, or for somebody who’s actually making decisions, to change policy.”

More Than a Story

“The SenseMaking tool is one way to uncover the very complex process of meaning-making in how people see the peace process,” said Karina Korostelina, professor and director of the Program for the Prevention of Mass Violence.

Karina Korostelina, professor and director of George Mason's Program for the Prevention of Mass Violence.

In Ukraine, she said, peacemaking will likely include territorial concessions, which create moral dilemmas. Another dynamic, she said, is that people on both sides view the conflict drastically differently because of Putin’s information war.

“Helping reveal these complex patterns, and how people think about the issues, is very important for informing the peace process because governments and international actors have to know how people see and think about it,” she said.

The class, which is part of the school’s Peace Engineering Lab, exemplifies the Carter School’s key principles of innovation, integration of research and practice, and global impact, said Dean Alpaslan Özerdem.

“At the Carter School, we always strive to incorporate the cutting edge of scholarship and practice in our classroom experience,” Simmons added. “This project is a great example of how to do just that.”

Solon Simmons, Associate Professor of Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason.

Students also benefit from the experience, as their contributions have peace-impacting potential.

“SenseMaking in Ukraine brings an innovative way of responding to the war, and preparing our future capacities and knowledge base for the war’s end, so that the Carter School could respond to its peacemaking and peacebuilding challenges from a more informed basis with solid partnerships on the ground,” Özerdem said. “It shows the real impact that our Peace Labs have started to have.”

Topics

Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution

Carter School Leadership

Peace Engineering Lab

Ukraine

Russia

Narrative

Reconstructing their narratives: $300,000 DOJ grant elevates Mason’s lynching research

Mariam Aburdeineh — Fri, 11 Dec 2020 17:43:08 +0000

Reconstructing their narratives: $300,000 DOJ grant elevates Mason’s lynching research Mariam Aburdeineh Fri, 12/11/2020 - 12:43

Topics

Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution

Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution

John Mitchell Jr Program for History Justice and Race

Justice and Race

Conflict Resolution

Narrative

Black African Heritage

Black Lives Matter

undergraduate research opportunities

Undergraduate Education

Campus News

In This Story

Charles Chavis

Of the more than 4,000 lynchings of Black Americans that took place in the United States between 1865 and 1950, at least 43 cases occurred in Maryland.

George Mason University’s John Mitchell Jr. Program (JMJP), housed within the Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution, has been helping research several of these cases since 2019 to support the Maryland Lynching Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In October, they received news that they will be taking their research to the next level, thanks to a $300,000 Department of Justice grant they helped secure for the commission.

Charles Chavis speaks at a dialogue on memorialization in December 2019. Photo provided.

“States, in terms of their narratives, don’t shed light on these historic traumas,” said Carter School professor Charles Chavis, who is on the board of directors for the Maryland Lynching Memorial Project. “We wanted to give life to the relatives of victims whose loved ones had been forgotten.”

The grant, which is part of the Emmett Till Cold Case Investigations Program, will allow the commission and JMJP to supercharge their research.

“We work directly with the relatives in the sentence that we identify because we believe there is a direct line that can be drawn from the racial terror and lynchings of old to the existing racial terror and anti-blackness that we continue to see manifest in 2020,” Chavis said. “[With the grant] we’re now able to hire expert genealogists to help us track down the relatives [of lynching victims] so that they can be a part of the process.”

$100,000 is set aside for the communities and families of the victims for restorative justice reform, said Chavis, who founded JMJP to address narrative change and social transformation. The rest of the funds will go toward live reconciliation-style hearings.

“We work through each individual case in the various communities with key expert witnesses, relatives, descendants bearing witness to this history,” Chavis said.

Before that happens, Chavis said the Mason team helps with forensic reconstruction, which involves leaning on existing research and records to put together a mosaic of the case.

The Maryland State Archives have been key to their efforts.

“Students have been able to work directly with the research, documenting cases, doing census data, pulling death certificates, verifying biographical data and pulling together narratives of individuals,” Chavis said.

In the process, undergraduate and graduate students are gaining hands-on activist and research experience.

“What has been most important for me is being able to put some of what I learned about narrative approaches to racial and social justice into practice,” said master’s in conflict analysis and resolution student Audrey Williams, who is one of five students supporting the commission.

She said the project has also helped her better understand her role in creating change.

“You have to recommit to confronting anti-Black racism every day,” Williams said. “What that means for people who already benefit from the system is committing, with humility, to listening to and platforming the voices of colleagues, friends, and community members who have been harmed, and to becoming comfortable with being uncomfortable. The best place for this entire process to start is in our own hallways, classrooms and relationships.”

Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution

Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution

John Mitchell Jr Program for History Justice and Race

Justice and Race

Conflict Resolution

Narrative

Black African Heritage

Black Lives Matter

undergraduate research opportunities

Undergraduate Education

Campus News

Sara Cobb

admin_alpha — Tue, 20 Oct 2015 23:24:01 +0000

Sara Cobb admin_alpha Tue, 10/20/2015 - 19:24

Professor Emerita, Carter School

Contact Information

Email: scobb@gmu.edu
Phone: 703-993-4452
Campus: Arlington
Building: Arlington: Vernon Smith Hall
Room 5078
Mail Stop: 4D3

Biography

Dr. Sara Cobb, (Ph.D., University of Massachusetts, Amherst) is Professor Emerita at the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University, where she was also the Director for 8 years. In this context she teaches and conducts research on the relationship between narrative and violent conflict; she is also the Director of the Center for the Study of Narrative and Conflict Resolution at the Carter School that provides a hub for scholarship on narrative approaches to conflict analysis and resolution. Formerly, she was the Director of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School and has held positions at a variety of tier one research institutions such as University of California, Santa Barbara, University of Connecticut, and more recently at the University of Amsterdam. She has also consulted to and/or conducted training for a host of public and private organizations, including UN High Commission on Refugees, UNDP, La Caxia Bank, and Exxon, the American Bar Association, Fox Learning Academy as well as a number of universities in Europe and Latin America. Dr. Cobb is widely published. Her book, Speaking of Violence: The Politics and Poetics of Narrative in Conflict Resolution offers a narrative perspective on both conflict analysis and conflict resolution. She has been a leader in the fields of negotiation and conflict resolution studies, conducting research on the practice of neutrality, as well as the production of “turning points” and “critical moments” in negotiation processes. Some of this research is based on case studies from her field research in Guatemala, Chile, Rwanda and the Netherlands. The blend of academic research, program development, and practice enables Dr. Cobb to develop research projects that can yield practical understanding and generate effective interventions.

Honors and Awards

Psychotherapy with Women Award, American Psychological Association

Affiliations

Member of Global Advisory Board at Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies
Associate at the Taos Institute
Honorary Fellow at the American College of Civil Trial Mediators

Media Appearances

ABC 7 News The ISIS Narrative: A long term strategy for peace
November 22, 2015
Medium Dr. Sara Cobb and the Narrative Practice
November 10, 2015

In the News

12th Annual Communication and Social Action Conference to ‘Reframe Blame’ Next Week
Published on March 14, 2011
Full article
Washington Post Features ICAR Director Sara Cobb and Point of View
Published on November 14, 2017
Full article

Degrees

PhD, Communication, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
MEd, Counseling, University of Puget Sound
BA, English (Honors), Albertus Magnus College