Episode 1- What Would Peace look Like in Acapulco? The Views of Local Practitioners and Stakeholders

In the first episode, we talk with Professor Evelyn Arizpe and Professor Sinead Gormally, who are based at the University of Glasgow. Evelyn and Sinead lead the Project called “Educational Peacebuilding in Medellin Acapulco, Understanding the Role of Education, Culture and Learning in Responding to Crises”. This project was funded by The British Academy. We delve into this project to learn more about community engagement in peacebuilding, conceptualisations of peace, and much more.

If you want to read more about their work, the following article is available in open access - "What would peace look like in Acapulco? The views of local practitioners and stakeholders."
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epdf/10.1177/15423166231179239

Professor Sinead Gormally is a Professor of Community Development and Youth in the School of Education at the University of Glasgow. She is a qualified community and youth work practitioner and has worked in the UK and abroad with a range of communities and young people. Her current research falls into two categories. The first focuses on social justice and equality, analysing how youth and community practitioners can create positive social change. The second area of interest focuses on the impact of violence and conflict on individuals and communities. Her academic teaching and research focuses on Community Development, Youth Work, Social Justice, Equality and Rights-based work. She teaches across undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in the School of Education. Her additional current roles include Research and Training Group Lead for People, Place and Social Change; Member of the Executive Committee of the Community, Learning and Development (CLD) Standards Board for Scotland; and Board of Directors for the Professional Association for Lecturers in Community and Youth Work (Research Director).

Professor Evelyn Arizpe is a Professor of Children's Literature in the School of Education at the University of Glasgow. She has worked in the field of children's literature and literacy for over 25 years, starting with her undergraduate thesis on Mexican children's literature in the 1980s at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City and then during her doctoral work at the University of Cambridge on adolescent readers and YA literature. While in Cambridge, together with Morag Styles, She pioneered research into children’s response to picturebooks and visual literacy and their co-authored book, Children Reading Picturebooks: Interpreting Visual Texts (2003/2016), which is now considered a classic study in this area. At the University of Glasgow, she helped to create the MEd in Children's Literature and Literacies, which has now been running for nearly ten years. She leads an Erasmus Mundus Joint Masters in Children's Literature, Media and Culture (IMCLMC). In the last decade, her research projects have had a focus on migration and displacement (Visual Journeys and Journeys from Images to Words) and she built on these to develop a programme for migrant readers through the Salas de Lectura project in the Mexican Ministry of Culture (2016-2018). Overall, she has developed her expertise by bridging, on the one hand, the theory and analysis of text and, on the other, reading and reader response. She has worked with both young adult (YA) texts and with picturebooks in research with participants of different ages and across different countries, especially in Mexico. She has published widely in English and Spanish. In 2022, she was on the jury for the Hans Christian Andersen Award, International Board on Books for Children and Young People (IBBY).