Media for Peace Building

mediaforpeacebuilding.com is a new Weblog recently created by a young woman. She is American, and studied in Stadtschlaining at the European Peace University. Kimberlye Kowalczyk is Editor and Facilitator. She was born and raised in Kyoto, Japan to an American father and a Korean mother in a small international community dedicated to building intercultural understanding through the arts, reverential ecology, education, conflict resolution, and reconciliation.

Education and Skills

She has an

• MA in Conflict Transformation from the School for International Training in Vermont, USA.
• Since being the first student at Antioch College to graduate with a BA in Peace Studies and Journalism,
• she has pursued an interest in Peace Journalism in education and career.

Her experiences in media has included as

• the resident peace journalist for Transcend Media Service (Austria).

• as web-reporter onboard the 54^th global voyage of the Peace Boat,
• assistant editor and journalist for the Women’s Feature Service (New Delhi, India)
• working as journalist and lay-out/design assistant for the Kyoto Journal (Japan)

Developement of the Peace Media Framework

In 2008 Kimberlye co-developed the Peace Media Framework, hailed as a trail-blazer for its effectiveness as a training tool for anyone or group using media for peacebuilding. She has lectured and facilitated

• workshops on the subject of Peace Journalism and
• more recently on Peace Media in Asia, the United States, Europe and the Middle East at universities, research institutes, organizations, and for groups of media professionals.

Media today

They have been

• largely corporatized and
• monopolized,
• creating a monologic media landscape
• which acts as a megaphone for private interests, and
• can easily create an environment conducive to violence in times of war.

Peace Journalism is an established academic field that offers a remedy to the propaganda-driven mainstream media. It has infused journalism practices with the lessons of Peace & Conflict studies and provides journalists the tools to combat us vs. them, zero-sum game reporting by giving voice to the often-ignored peacebuilders in society and thereby offering nonviolent solutions to conflict.

Peace Media takes Peace Journalism a step further by expanding the concept of media practice beyond orthodox reporting (print, TV, and radio) and includes other nonconventional forms like music, theater, and graphic arts, which are more commonly used by citizen journalists in distributing a message.

In the New Media era more people have access to media and often use media in advocating for a cause or to start a movement. Therefore, it is not just journalists who need training on how to effectively infuse their media practices with values like proactive nonviolence, dialogue, conflict analysis (the fundamentals of peacebuilding), but anyone who uses media for peacebuilding.

As the first site of its kind on the web, this website’s mission is to build Peace Media literacy by providing a showcase of successful examples of how media can be used to build a sustainable, positive peace.  It provides the mainstream consumer access to information about what alternatives to the increasingly monologic media landscape exist by offering an accessible, easy to understand summary of what peace is and how to go about achieving it in our communities, societies, and the world, by pulling together lessons from the greatest peace scholars in history (Mohandas K. Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr, John Paul Lederach, Gene Sharp, Johan Galtung, and many more). Finally, the editor of the website (Kimberlye Kowalczyk) is a dedicated peacebuilding practitioner, who can be consulted for further information on how to more effectively practice Peace Media.

Link

mediaforpeacebuilding.com