Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
Woodhouse Lane,
LS1 3HE
peace studies research group
Leeds School of Arts
The Peace Studies Research Group focuses on investigations into the development and application of forms of non-violent activism and approaches to peacekeeping, critical arts strategies, and grassroots organising for social justice and change. Researchers within the Peace Studies Research Group
are interested in how individuals and communities can instigate change through peaceful action and organising on local, national and international scales. The Peace Studies Research Group aims to document and create new peaceful mechanisms and approaches for tackling violence, weapons manufacture, inequalities and injustice in the UK and abroad.
The Peace Studies Research Group focuses on the following key strands:
- Non-violent approaches to peacekeeping
- Critical arts strategies for peaceful activism and social justice
Peace Studies Research Group Members
Jill’s research is interdisciplinary relating to art, and the arms trade. She has contributed to the ‘aesthetic turn’ (Bleiker, 2001) in War Studies by drawing the etiquette of the arms trade, showing how weapon sales are legitimised through rituals of business. Her performance as an arms trader provides a metaphor for the masquerade of respectability in the industry, and challenges the implicit positivism of much reportage. She contextualizes this approach by retrieving examples where reportage has been used as a political act, for instance in Dada.
Monnier is a lecturer with research interests in peaceful feminist activism, gender, and social justice.
Peace Studies Research Group Collaborators
Dr Rachel Julian has 25 years of experience working internationally in peace and conflict including disarmament, peacebuilding, nonviolence and Unarmed Civilian Peacekeeping. She spans the practice-research divide by maintaining strong connections to the practice of creating peaceful communities as well as innovative research in understanding how local people are key to success in prevention violence and sustainable peace.
Dr Rachel Julian focus's on the importance of everyday life and stories in social change and peace. This work includes studying the role of local ownership in community projects in the UK, creating a case study that examines the relationship people have to the projects in their neighbourhoods. An ongoing project studies the impact on peaceful protest of increasing private ownership of public land in the UK through the stories of activists and social change work.
