Kimberley Motley, Project Advisor, AFGHANISTAN
PROJECTS
Global projects for global change.
Our projects are developed in collaboration with our faculty, fellows, and advisory board to further our mission, particularly in the policy arenas of peacemaking, health and human rights.
It all begins with an idea for the greater good. Join us.
Projects and Collaborations
The Global Women’s Narratives Project
Founded by UNESCO Chair Dr. Lyn Boyd-Judson in 2017, our Global Women’s Narratives Project is part of our foundational mission that cuts across all of our workshops and global projects—engaging the personal and collective power of women’s lived experiences to create a database of narratives that storytellers, policymakers, scholars, lawyers, and human rights advocates can use to affect change.
We have interviewed combatants, peace activists, religious leaders, rural coffee growers, former political prisoners, refugees, mothers, daughters, and politicians from the USA, Bosnia, Northern Ireland, Israel, Venezuela, Armenia, Kurdistan, Serbia, El Salvador, Thailand, Colombia, South Africa, Nicaragua, Turkey, Egypt, India, China, Ghana, Brazil, and Iraq. The list continues to grow.
Oxford Conferences— Human Rights Law
In collaboration with Sultana Tafadar, convenor of the International Human Rights Law Association (IHRLA Oxford) and special advisor to the Oxford Initiative, we will co-host annual summer conferences on salient issues in international human rights law. Our first annual conference in Summer of 2021 will be on the topic of health and human rights with a focus on Covid-19. These annual summer conferences of two-three days will be scheduled alongside the Oxford Initiative’s summer workshops and the summer sessions of the MSt program in International Human Rights law held at New College, Oxford.
Refugee Children’s Libraries—Greece
Our Fellow Manas Ghanem has established two multi-language libraries of mother-tong and bilingual stories for 50,000 refugee children and youth in Greece. With her partners, she is supplying storybooks in Arabic, English, Farsi, French and Greek to help children connect with each other worldwide beyond the geographic borders so all would learn using the same language of creativity, imagination and beauty. The psycho-social hope is that children will feel less inferior or excluded being refugees, migrants or different when they have the opportunity to read the same stories and learn values their peers read and learn all over the world. Image credit: Refugee library, Athens, Greece. AFP: ARIS MESSINIS
Violence, Trauma, Women, & the Right to Mental Health
A NARRATIVE PROJECT ON HUMAN RIGHTS POLICY
Conflict Narratives— Ethiopia
In partnership with Dr. Evelyne Tauschnitz of the Geneva Institute and Moges Shiferaw of the Life and Peace Institute in Ethiopia, we are collaborating on a project to build peace in Ethiopia through exploring similarities in patterns of women’s narratives across ethnic and religious divisions. Ethnic conflicts between the Oromo and the Gedeo people in the south of the country led to Ethiopia having the largest number of people to flee their homes in 2018. Our project searches for patterns in women’s narratives with the help of narrow artificial intelligence and text analysis. Our hope is to produce innovative research insights and an open data base which can be used for policy recommendations and the drafting of need-based development and peace programs for women.
Conflict and Creative Writing—Workshops
Our Fellow Damian Gorman designs and facilitates the signature writing workshop on conflict narratives. His workshops aim to challenge our delegates and community to think about the redress of the word in conflict situations, and encourage them in the agency of their own creativity. Most recently, Damian hosted a Zoom event from Belfast with recent workshops delegates and editors from the women’s narratives project. Damian discussed the issues which can come up when you're working with people to make something public out of their own stories of conflict. For more on Damian, you can google "Damian Gorman - Personal Visions" or go to our Fellows page.
Oxford Global PeaceTech Project
Dr. Kalypso Nicolaidis and her colleagues at Oxford’s PeaceTech Lab strongly ascribe to shared values of humanity, tolerance and non-discrimination that are vital for the peaceful coexistence of ethnic and religious groups, peoples and nations. Our Global Women’s Narratives Project is a partner with the Oxford Peacetech Lab in the effort to give local women living in conflict zones from both sides of the conflict the opportunity to tell their stories and how the conflict affects their daily lives in order to overcome ignorance and re-humanize ‘the enemy’. The project is currently paused while seeking future funding.
Law, Religion, & Human Rights—Brazil
Founded by advisory board member and federal judge Dr. Fernada Duarte and Dr. Rafael Iorio, Vice-Chancellor and Professor of Law at Estácio de Sá University, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the largest law school in Brazil. The project designs curriculum for PhD students to gather narratives from women of Afro religions in Brazil for legal and social analysis of minority rights.
Get in touch.
If you are interested in learning more about any of the projects described above, write and tell us more. We will connect you to the appropriate director or partner.