Broaden and deepen your understanding of how we create, perpetuate, remember, and reconcile conflict – and meet community leaders working toward peace and reconciliation via dialogue and deliberation. Explore Northern Ireland and a bit of the Republic of Ireland to see how dialogue is transforming neighborhoods.
Some of the questions we wrestle with include: How do people memorialize war? Peace? Violence? Sacrifice? How are scapegoats portrayed artistically and narratively? How do scapegoats both create recipes for genocide and possibilities for peace? How do we “remember rightly” as Miroslav Volf asks? When we create memorials or stories of our pasts, what are we remembering, and what are we forgetting? Who decides, ultimately, which stories are truthful, and which accounts will be publicly enshrined? Whether in our families or our nations, how do we weave our sense of self into stories and images and spaces that tell us who we are as well as who we are not?
Some places we visit memorialize terrible tragedies and loss of life. Other spaces are still fought over both literally and figuratively. Your feet will get dusty and sore on the paths of conflict. You will experience bodily a space, a memorial, a performance and the resulting uncertainties, anxieties, excitements, and triumphs that accompany the journey to, in, and through new places, peoples, and cultures.
Finally, by traveling together in community, with all of its challenges and joys, you will develop skills and appreciation required for living and traveling intensively with others.
