Passing on the history of ‘comfort women’: the experiences of a women’s museum in Japan

This article explores the activities and experiences of a women’s peace museum in Japan which especially tries to pass on the history of Japan’s military sexual slavery, or the ‘comfort women’ issue. The system of Japan’s military sexual slavery had not been written as a part of history until courageous survivors testified and documentary evidence was unearthed in the 1990s. With few material exhibits of sexual violence, testimonies play a significant role in the exhibitions. Panels displaying the testimony of both survivors and former soldiers try to represent the person as a whole, situating sexual enslavement or crimes as part of their overall life, rather than extracting the harsh experience in an isolated way. The concrete and detailed activities of this privately run museum show the challenges faced by museums dealing with the dark history of their own country.     

Pedagogical discourses of gender,peace, and equality: Jane Addams Children’s Book Awards

This article discusses a feminist critical discourse analysis research project of award-winning books of the Jane Addams Peace Association. Children’s books carry societal messages that are gendered, raced, and classed, with award-winning books carrying an additional message of exceptionality as they are viewed as deserving of attention. Thus, the discourses they circulate are important points of analysis. This research, using data from the Jane Addams Children’s Book Awards (focusing on books for older children – young adult literature), takes a feminist antimilitarist perspective to explore the sociocultural implications of children’s literature for education and learning. I examine research with respect to award-winning literature, define my theoretical framework of feminist antimilitarism, explain my methodology of feminist discourse analysis, and detail my findings. I conclude that the awards as a whole function pedagogically to define conflict in ways that privilege colonial discourses, with women represented in essentialist ways and inequality perceived as absent in the contemporary West.     

‘Pedagogies of resistance’ and critical peace education praxis

This paper explores ‘pedagogies of resistance’ – or critical and democratic educational models utilized by social movements – and how global examples of engaged educational praxis may inform peace education. The central inquiry of this article is ‘How can educational projects that resist larger social, political and economic inequalities offer understandings about how we learn, teach, and act for peace in diverse settings?’ Drawing upon literature from various fields, ideas and insights are offered about how the field of peace education can better respond to multiple and diverse realities, particularly those facing marginalized communities. The article provides an overview of key tenets of peace education and ideas central to ‘critical peace education;’ offers a framing of ‘pedagogies of resistance;’ and, lastly, details what directions emerge by putting these two educational forms in conversation.