Platforming Peace

Project Objectives

Reclaiming digital space

Landecker Democracy Fellow Kris’s project, Platforming Peace, will convene a cohort of at least ten activists who represent different communities impacted by violence, including gender, sexual, racial, colonial, religious, economic, and political harm. Cohort members will cultivate anti-violence narrative strategies, which will be used to establish a virtual space that uplifts the stories of people who have struggled against abuse and exploitation. In fostering a diverse exchange of anti-violence discourses, this project will reclaim digital space as a site for organizing peace and collaboration, rather than discrimination and social decay.

Developing educational curricula & community trainings

Additionally, the cohort will develop educational curricula and community training modules to empower marginalized groups to design meaningful public policy responses to confrontations with violence. Participants will generate a collective anti-violence agenda around which to organize their communities, with particular attention being given to youth, whose social and educational lives are heavily shaped by the accelerating pace of technology. The shared policy agenda crafted by the cohort and the curricula for its most successful trainings will be incorporated into the Platforming Peace virtual space for public distribution, alongside the narratives of survival from which these policy goals emerge.

Location

Platforming Peace will be launched in the politically dynamic islands of Hawai’i. Within the last year, over 20,000 Native Hawaiians have been mobilized by concerns about the commodification of culturally significant spaces. Campus climate surveys show that the number of University of Hawai’i students experiencing sexual violence has risen to over 3,500. Over 10,000 community members marched in support of racial justice in Honolulu this year following police killings of people of color in Hawai’i. Thus, this project’s potential impact numbers in the thousands throughout the islands to overcome manifested violence in personal lives and public institutions.

Updated December 2021.