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Georg Arnhold Senior Fellowship 2021
From January to June 2021, Dr Sara Clarke-Habibi will conduct her research as Georg Arnhold Senior Fellow. Dr. Sara Clarke-Habibi has worked in the field of peacebuilding through education for 20 years as a practitioner, researcher, curriculum developer and trainer. Her research and teaching focus on educational intersections with violent conflict and displacement, historical trauma and psychosocial healing, transitional justice and post-conflict reconstruction, critical peacebuilding and intergroup reconciliation. She is particularly interested in how these issues affect the development of educational policy, curricula and textbooks; teacher identity, practice and agency; formal and nonformal educational interventions in transitional societies; memory and intergenerational relations in educational settings; and strategies for empowering youth as critical peace actors. She earned an MPhil (2012) and PhD (2017) in Education at the University of Cambridge, an MA in Conflict Resolution (2002) from Landegg International University, and a BA in Ethics, Society and Law (1999) from the University of Toronto.
Dr. Clarke-Habibi led the first post-war peace education program in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the early 2000s, working intensively with 6000 students and 400 teachers on psychosocial recovery, intercommunity peacebuilding and reconciliation using whole-school, cross-curricular approaches. She has since specialised in secondary school education and teacher training in the Western Balkans and is the author of three substantive teaching manuals in this field, as well as several scientific articles, chapters and technical reports. Beyond the Balkans, Dr. Clarke-Habibi has supported peacebuilding projects and practitioners in another 20 countries across the Americas, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Southeast Asia in collaboration with numerous NGOs and universities.
She currently works as an educational consultant for UNICEF, UNDP, UNFPA and RYCO in the Western Balkans, developing training materials and methodologies aimed at strengthening teacher and youth competences for intercultural dialogue, peacebuilding and dealing with the past. She is also a researcher at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, where she analyses educational provision for migrant and refugee populations.
During her stay at GEI as the 2021 Georg Arnhold Senior Fellow, Dr. Clarke-Habibi will be completing a monograph for publication that expands upon her doctoral dissertation, “Peacing together a conflicted society: Educational values, voices and practices in Bosnia and Herzegovina”, completed at University of Cambridge in 2017. The research traces shifts in education for peace practices in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) over a 20-year period. In doing so, it explores contrasting interpretive frames among contemporary education actors (policymakers, teacher educators, secondary school leaders, teachers and students) regarding the role of education in building sustainable peace and reconciliation in the country, and the impacts of these contrasting logics on differentiated engagement with curricula, educational media, classroom dialogue and the community. Enriching the monograph will be research since undertaken across the Western Balkans 6 that situates the BiH case study within wider social-political and educational trends in the region.
The monograph will make several unique contributions to the field. Firstly, it examines the challenge of education for sustainable peace within a longitudinal perspective, capturing the dynamics of both an evolving social-political context and the transition in BiH secondary schools from war to post-war to post-memory generations, raising reflections that will be of relevance to peacebuilding actors in other conflict-affected and transitional societies. Secondly, it moves beyond the "three parallel curricula" criticism of BiH post-war education to look more closely at how teachers and students reframe official curricula and supplement textbooks with personal narratives, alternative pedagogical resources and online resources and networks, in order to bridge the gap between peacebuilding theory and the structurally divided reality. Thirdly, it dissects intergenerational tensions in BiH secondary schools concerning the perceived purposes, content and methods of education, highlighting youth peacebuilding needs, demands and forms of resistance of ongoing relevance to planning, intervention and reform. Finally, it identifies priorities for further research and dialogue, for the improvement of pedagogical resources, teacher education and practice, thus offering practical recommendations for policymakers and educators working with secondary school youth and teachers in BiH and related contexts.
In addition to her work on the monograph, Dr. Clarke-Habibi will be co-editing a volume on “Peace Pedagogies in Bosnia and Herzegovina” in collaboration with Dr. Larisa Kasumagić-Kafedžić at the University of Sarajevo, as well as contributing to GEI seminars and Georg Arnhold programme summer conference.