The tenth and final installment of the Peacebuilder podcast’s first season features Dr. Jayne S. Docherty, executive director of the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP) at Eastern Mennonite University (EMU). Docherty speaks on her path to the field, the importance of considering worldviews in a conflict, and how the program has grown and changed since she joined as the first non-Mennonite faculty member, shortly before 9/11.The concept of worldview is a keystone in Docherty’s stories. It shaped how she interpreted the fiasco at Waco, Texas between the Branch Davidians and the FBI, which she wrote her dissertation on while a doctoral student at the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University. It’s also the reason she chose to teach at EMU – “it’s the only place nobody asked me what I meant by worldview,” she says.But she prefers “the word ‘world viewing’ better, because it’s an activity that we engage in all day long.”Docherty went on to publish a book based on her dissertation: Learning Lessons from Waco: When the Parties Bring their Gods to the Negotiation Table. That research taught her a lot about mediation and negotiation in a situation where two groups have a “toxic combination” of shared and different assumptions of the world.“When the worldview differences are really, really deep, you can’t convince the other party to do anything. All you can do is construct a space in which they can convince themselves,” she explains. “Every worldview is a way of seeing, but it’s also a way of not seeing. So what are you not seeing?” Acknowledging your own and others’ ways of world viewing makes team-based conflict analysis all the more important, Docherty says. That way you can cover for one anothers’ blind spots.Docherty had to navigate some differences in worldviews when she came to the then-Conflict Transformation Program as an Italian Catholic whose father was a career Air Force officer. “At CJP, coming in as a cultural outsider, I was literally the first non-Mennonite hired into the faculty for this program,” she says. Even so, she’s found an “authentic care for one another. I think that’s what we have. I think that’s what we strive for here.”Her hopes for CJP in another 25 years? That the program is recognized, not just internationally, but also in its own figurative and literal backyard as “a really dynamic organizing location for peace, justice, and nonviolence, and doing work in a trauma-informed way.” We already have a strong network of graduates doing good work in the field, Docherty says, but it’s somewhat of a “latent network. And our job right now is to try to plug that in.”

Peacebuilder: a Conflict Transformation podcast by CJP

World Viewing

Dr. Howard Zehr is director emeritus of the Zehr Institute for Restorative Justice and a distinguished professor of restorative justice at the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. In this ninth episode, he talks about his path to victim-offender conferencing as a young practitioner, the early days of restorative justice, and where he sees the field going from here.One of Zehr’s formative experiences as a young adult was attending Morehouse College, a historically black men’s college in Atlanta. He was confronted with being part of a “minority” as one of the few white students in attendance.“People just didn’t read me the way I was used to being read. My body language, what I said was interpreted totally different[ly],” Zehr recalls. “It was a profound experience and not an easy one.”It was in the 1970s, while teaching at another historically black institution, Talladega College in Alabama, when Zehr started working with the criminal justice system. He provided support to prisoners and trained student research teams “to help defense attorneys pick juries in really highly politicized cases: death penalty, prison riots, police brutality.”In 1985, Zehr published the booklet Retributive Justice, Restorative Justice, followed by Changing Lenses in 1990, a seminal work in Zehr’s own career and the field at large. He joined CJP in 1996, at the urging of Professor Ray Gingerich and Director Vernon Jantzi.“My self concept is basically a journalist of justice,” Zehr says – communication and networking are foundational to his work. The whole reason he launched the Little Books of Justice and Peacebuilding series was to make the core concepts of CJP accessible to a wider audience. Zehr pitched the first title, The Little Book of Restorative Justice, to his publisher saying, “I want it to cost about the same as a Big Mac dinner.” Over 100,000 copies of the book have now been sold in a variety of languages.What does he celebrate most about CJP? “We’re still, as far as I know, the only academic program with a practice, a reflective practitioner value-based kind of approach. Which is what we set out to be.”Looking forward another 25 years, Zehr says he likes where he sees the next generation going.“That’s partly why I’m staying out of it,” he says. “A lot of them have a much wider vision about applications – to historical harms, to social injustices – but I don’t want us to lose also some of our focus on things like bringing those who are harmed and those who caused harm in the context of a criminal system together as well … I hope we can hold those things together.”

Journalist of Justice

Katie Mansfield, lead trainer of the Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience (STAR) program at the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP), speaks about her path to STAR from working in multinational banking during 9/11, polyvagal theory, and her dissertation work on embodied trauma healing.Mansfield, who was raised on Long Island, flew back to New York on September 8, 2011, to be close to her mother after her grandmother’s death. She lost friends in the terror attacks on September 11. “I was physically present with both a sense of fear and powerlessness that I had not, until that point, experienced in my body before,” Mansfield says. A few years later, she quit her job and began learning about different ways of seeing the world from a family in India – a peace education teacher; his wife, a human rights lawyer; and his mother, the first female high court justice in the country.During “time around their table, they were just removing dirt from my eyes,” Mansfield says. When she returned to the States, she worked with the organization Peace Games alongside school children grappling with neighborhood violence and interpersonal conflict. Her mentor there suggested she pursue further education in peace studies. Mansfield went on to study under John Paul Lederach at the Kroc Institute at Notre Dame, who suggested she take a class in restorative justice at the program he helped found – CJP. After finishing her master’s in international peace studies, she attended the Summer Peacebuilding Institute in 2009, which “made a very strong impression.” She recalls attending a STAR training in 2010, where she talked about her experiences on 9/11. Another attendee from Somalia told her, “Well, now you know how we feel every day.”Mansfield’s doctoral dissertation, Re-friending My Body: Arts-based, embodied learning for restoring my entirety, in part draws on neuroscientist Stephen Porges’ polyvagal theory, which deals with the vagus nerve’s role in the embodiment of emotion and trauma.“So many of us are learning the words, but not the embodiment,” Mansfield says. “Trauma and joy and life land on the body, and systems and structures, and how people respond to us is because of what’s happening in the nervous system. Do I feel safe in a situation in my body, or do I feel endangered?”In researching for her dissertation, Mansfield was confronted with the power and privilege she’s experienced in her own life, and their effects on how she interacts with others. Similarly, she sees one of CJP’s core challenges now, at its 25th anniversary, as overcoming a tradition of “helpers and healers” going from a privileged and safe position to help others in less privileged situations.“That model is a holdover from colonial mindsets, and it is not fully respectful of the incredible resilience, capacity, wisdom, power, healthy power that exists in all of these communities that some people are trying to go help,” Mansfield says.

Re-friending My Body

This seventh episode features Bill Goldberg, director of the Summer Peacebuilding Institute (SPI). He speaks on the importance of grassroots and domestic peacebuilding, even in Eastern Mennonite University’s (EMU) own backyard and campus.Goldberg jokes that he “married in” to the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP) through his wife, former faculty member Lisa Schirch. His background was in international relations that often dealt with negotiations between world leaders. At CJP, though, he saw the value of grassroots-level peacebuilding.“It actually was more important than the high level. That the high level negotiations would always fall apart if it wasn’t backed by lower level and by communities working together,” Goldberg says. He started taking classes at CJP, then picked up a few short-term contracts, like arranging transportation for SPI. He became the director in 2014.Goldberg’s predecessors, Pat Martin and Sue Williams, taught him a lot.“Pat had an open door policy that no matter what she was doing, no matter what time of day it was, if someone came to her office to talk, she would just drop everything and be with that person,” he says. “And with Sue, her analytical mind was just incredible,” whether it was arranging classes or “speaking truth to power.” One major change Goldberg has witnessed in his time at CJP is a shift towards domestic work, rather than focusing on international conflicts. In his early days he recalls international students challenging the faculty and staff - “you have to fix your own problems as well as help us fix ours. And I think it took 10, 15 years for that realization to set in.”This change has accelerated in the last few years, he says, due to fewer visas being approved – meaning domestic-born students are now in the majority at CJP – and a surge in white supremacist rhetoric across the U.S. and in Harrisonburg itself.“It’s just become much easier to be open about racism and bigotry, and to actually be a racist and a bigot out in the open, and so we’re now seeing the need to combat that more,” says Goldberg.While Goldberg sees this as a necessary and powerful shift, there are still ways he thinks EMU as a whole could improve: like hiring non-Christians as full-time faculty. Goldberg himself is Jewish, and while he understands the value of a Christian Mennonite university, the hiring policy “implies to others, only those who are Christian have the values to teach here.”

There's a knock on the door...

Dr. Johonna Turner, is assistant professor of restorative justice and peacebuilding at The Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP). In this episode, Turner speaks about her history of community organizing, activism, and youth development work in Washington, D.C.; the Faith Integration Task Force she helped form at Eastern Mennonite University (EMU); and her vision for CJP’s role in transnational movement-building.Turner first came to CJP in 2010 as a participant in the Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience program. She had been doing a variety of organizing and arts-based activism in Washington, D.C., and “was looking for a place where I could get some more skills to supplement and to really support me in the work that I was doing … the youth identified trauma healing as an approach that was especially important for breaking cycles of violence that depend upon repressive, state-sponsored punitive measures.” She joined the CJP faculty in the fall of 2015, and became the co-director of the Zehr Institute for Restorative Justice in 2018.About three years ago, Turner found herself in a number of conversations with faculty and students who wanted “to be more intentional about creating spaces for deliberate reflection on faith in the classroom, and spirituality writ large.” She banded together with Carl Stauffer, Tim Seidel, and Amy Knorr to create the Faith Integration Task Force to facilitate EMU as a “multi-faith space in a Christian university,” that both welcomes perspectives from other faiths while honoring its roots in Christian theology and spirituality.Out of those conversations, Turner has created classes such as “Peacebuilding Through Biblical Narrative” and “Justice, Peace, and the Biblical Story.” One of Turner’s goals through these courses is to understand the injustice, oppression, and violence “that are preventing abundant life for all people,” and find ways to discuss these issues in the church – a space she says is “often depoliticized.”While Turner says that CJP’s sense of community is a great strength, she also sees “the need for more intentional integration of critical theory within the curriculum, particularly feminist perspectives, critial race perspectives … queer perspectives in our curriculum and pedagogy as well, attention to racial and gender justice, attention at large to how systems of oppression are at the root of violence.”And her vision for CJP at 50? “A crucible, an incubator, of peacebuilders, organizers, artists, and activists who are not only able to connect their work to what’s happening in their own local contexts, but also able to see the linkages between what’s happening at their own places and what’s happening at other places. Who are able to challenge the systemic roots of oppression that give rise to acts of direct cultural and structural violence. And who are able to more deeply work at challenging all systems of oppression, including heterosexism.”

Colorizing Restorative Justice

This fifth episode features Dr. David Brubaker, dean of the school of social sciences and professions at Eastern Mennonite University, which includes the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP). In it Brubaker talks about the environmental and generational changes that organizations now face, the tension between focusing on international versus domestic conflict, and global trends of income inequality.Brubaker came to CJP in 2004, when it was known as the Conflict Transformation Program. At the time, he taught organizational studies; he now teaches organizational behavior, development, and leadership. He’s also worked as a consultant with over 100 organizations, from non-profit to for-profit to governmental, in 12 different countries.“There are just some really classic issues that tend to produce stress and conflict in organizations, no matter what part of the world they’re in or even what sector they’re in,” Brubaker says.Two major challenges that all organizations are now facing, Brubaker explains, are changes in the environment and the generational shift away from baby boomer values to those of Generation X and millennials.“Generational research has found  that millennials, for example, have a much higher priority on work-life balance,” Brubaker says. “People aren’t willing to just sign over their lives to organizations, as happened with my parents’ generation and with mine as well.”In his consulting practice, Brubaker has relied on all three academic pillars of CJP: conflict transformation, restorative justice, and trauma awareness and resilience, which he says are unique to be housed within one program.As to what CJP could be doing better, Brubaker says that many practitioners have been attracted by the “siren song” of international work, “often at the cost of paying attention to growing economic and social polarization in our own country.” At the same time, though, the trends we see in the U.S. are happening on a global scale, he says. “As the gap between the rich and the poor has grown around the world, we are seeing the rise of populism and nationalism because that’s how people give voice to their grievances,” says Brubaker. This feeds directly into his vision for CJP 25 years from now. He hopes by then the program will better address the intersection of politics and economics, by supporting those on the front lines of those conflicts.“Those who are closest to the problem or the challenge are the ones best able to figure out how to beat it,” Brubaker says.

When the Center Does Not Hold

Academic program coordinator, Janelle Myers-Benner, who has worked at CJP in various capacities for 20 years. Myers-Benner speaks of her formative experiences volunteering in Bolivia; the many programmatic shifts she’s helped usher through CJP; and memories of her second daughter, Nora, who died in 2008.As young adults, Myers-Benner and her husband, Jason, spent a year working at an orphanage in Bolivia. They returned to Harrisonburg “struggling with big, big questions, and [CJP] was a place where questions were welcome, and not only welcomed but engaged,” she says. Myers-Benner then got her first job with what was then called the Conflict Transformation Program in 1999 as a work study student.“I cannot reflect on my 20 years at CJP without Nora coming prominently to mind,” Myers-Benner says. Nora, the Myers-Benners’ second daughter, was born in October 2007 with a rare genetic condition. Myers-Benner worked from home and hospital throughout Nora’s life and returned to the CJP office when Nora was about four or five months old, baby in tow. She remembers the community rallying around her family during this time. In one story Myers-Benner recounts that Linda Swanson, a student at the time, “almost filled the CJP freezer with these big trays! I think she fed our family for a couple weeks … that was this abundance of generosity and this outpouring of love.” A CJP alumna, Ann McBroom, took Nora for long walks while Myers-Benner helped the program transition to EMU’s new database.“Many of the people who come through our doors are just unforgettable people … the roots feel very deep, and the connections feel very deep,” Myers-Benner says.Her hopes for CJP going forward are also focused on the people. In another 25 years, Myers-Benner says she hopes the school will further “center the leadership of indigenous people and people of color.”“We need leaders who are creative, who can dream, who can hope, who can envision something different than what we currently have, who’ve shown the ability to rise above immense challenges.”

Nora Lynne

In this episode, Dr. Carl Stauffer, professor of Restorative and Transitional Justice here at CJP and engaging storyteller reflects on his childhood in Vietnam and the way that war shaped his outlook on life; his early adulthood with a young family in South Africa during a time when the nation was experiencing rapid transition away from decades of apartheid rule. He talks passionately about how central his anabaptist faith has been pivotal in his work and how it continues to shape the way he shows up and teaches in the classroom. 

Remembering without Revenge

In this episode, Dr. Gloria Rhodes, professor of peacebuilding and conflict studies here at the Center for Justiceand Peacebuilding (CJP) at Eastern Mennonite University (EMU), talks about the field of conflict resolution and transformation. Rhodes begins the episode by looking back on her own introduction to conflict-related work, as a fresh EMU alumna teaching in Russia. She tells of how one day, an argument between students came to blows during Bible class. “They didn’t have a sense of interpersonal peacemaking, and I had grown up with that as a Mennonite … they really trusted authority to always be the problem-solvers, the decision-makers,” Rhodes explains. She felt driven to know more – so she returned to the United States to earn her masters and doctorate degrees in conflict analysis and resolution from George Mason University. Rhodes says that she, and CJP at large, have learned about self-assessment and acknowledging privilege. “As a white North American female with a PhD and middle income,” Rhodes said, “probably I’m not the right person to enter many situations as the expert, or as the person who might help to bring about change. So I think we all need to be able to ask those questions of ourselves. And I’d say that’s a change that has happened in our curriculum.”Rhodes sees this as part of a larger movement at CJP to examine not only the technical processes of peacebuilding work, but the bigger picture of how practitioners and educators live out their values. She hopes this examination will continue in the years to come. As a place ofhigher education, “we have legacies and privileges that go with that, that I think we are in the process of asking hard questions about that, but I think we still have learning to do,” Rhodes says.

Do No Harm

In this episode, Dr. Barry Hart, professor of trauma, identity and conflict studies here at CJP, reflects on his own beginnings in the field of conflict transformation and trauma work, definitions of trauma and trauma healing, how CJP has evolved since its inception, and where he sees it – and the entire field of justice and peacebuilding – growing from here.Hart has “officially” taught at CJP for 23 years, but first came on board as a summer workshop instructor in 1994. After graduating from Eastern Mennonite Seminary in 1978, Hart lived and worked overseas, developing a trauma healing and reconciliation program for the Christian Health Association of Liberia during the Liberian Civil War.“I was very keen on trying to weave together what I understood could be brought from the outside … the people themselves were very resilient, amazing in their own right, and had skills and traditions that could help in their own healing process,” Hart recalls in the podcast.CJP co-founder John Paul Lederach invited Hart to come present on his work during a Frontiers workshop (the Frontiers of Peacebuilding events were the precursors to today’s Summer Peacebuilding Institute).“Coming back was really just part of what I wanted to do, and who I felt I was,” Hart says. Hart has seen CJP through significant academic changes, like the inclusion of restorative justice and transitional justice curricula and the creation of the Foundations I and II courses. As for the future of the Center, Hart envisions CJP addressing the climate crisis and its intersecting issues more effectively. “If we can go forward with a real sense of care for each other, care for the planet in a way that, actually, has not only care but practical actions, then I think we’ve gone a long way. So 50 years from now, we may be known as a Center for Justice, Peacebuilding, and the Environment,” says Hart.

Cycle of Dignity

A trailer to Peacebuilder, a podcast by the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP), at Eastern Mennonite University, in Harrisonburg, Va. We here at CJP are celebrating 25 years since our founding. We’ve been celebrating this milestone since July first 2019 and will carry on through the end of June 30, 2020. This podcast delves into who we’ve been, who we are and who we hope to be. 

Peacebuilder Trailer

Peacebuilder is a podacast by The Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP) launched during our 25th anniversary (1995 - 2020). CJP is a graduate program at Eastern Mennonite University (EMU) in Harrisonburg, Virginia. USA.

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Peacebuilder: a Conflict Transformation podcast by CJP

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