The workshop took place on 27 and 28 May. It included presentations and discussions on how arts-based practices relate to local relational peace work, but also created spaces for in-depth exploration of these practices through co-creation sessions and reflective engagement with concrete examples. It also included visits to local sites and museums in Sarajevo. The workshop was co-organized by the PCRC, Maarten van Alstein (Flemish Peace Institute), Tiffany Fairey (King’s College London), Ilaria Tucci (Tampere University) and Cindy Horst (PRIO).
Participants explored how creative methods contribute to local peacebuilding in conflict-affected contexts, through practice-based as well as academic sessions. The workshop opened with theatre-based explorations led by Ilaria Tucci, focusing on embodied approaches to understanding local peace. Tiffany Fairey hosted an interactive workshop on peace photography and spoke of her work using Photovoice and other photography-based approaches to explore local peace indicators with communities in new ways.
Several participants presented their work, with Nina Bries Silva (University of Louvain) presented “Sacred mapping as a tool for visually representing the harm caused to Indigenous Territories by the armed conflict and its use in the Colombian Peace Process for reparation measures.” Dilara Kina (Hacettepe University / Ministry of National Education), shared insights from “Storytelling work with displaced families and group sessions with Kurdish-speaking parents.” Uliana Furiv (University of Utrecht) presented “Arts as a Practice of Staying Connected: Researching and Practising International Higher Arts Education Collaboration with Ukraine.” Further presentations were delivered by Larissa Fuhrmann (Peace Research Institute Frankfurt), on curating exhibitions with Sudanese artists and Charles Warner (University of Leuven) on the use of arts-based methods with veterans. A panel of practitioners and academics discussed the situation of education in Bosnia.
Interactive sessions were hosted by Cindy Horst and Ilaria Tucci, to identify key questions and dilemmas researchers and practitioners faced in this work, and by Maarten van Alstein and Merel Selleslach, who led discussions on policy implications and recommendations. Cindy Horst facilitated a final session where everyone identified key eye openers or learnings they were taking with them. This included learnings from Sarajevo and Bosnia, as well as the insight that the consequences of war affect generations to come so - as one junior scholar from a war-affected country highlighted: 'I have now realized that I will probably be doing this work for the rest of my life'.
