Spirit in Action

Stout-hearted Peace Studies at the UW

There's a young Peace Studies program at UW-Stout, where we talk to Senior Lecturer in Peace Studies and Geography, James Handley, a current student, Emma Kornack, and a Peace Studies graduate and Americorps volunteer, Shelby Schuppe. What does the program teach, and what changes does it bring about, in students and in the community?

Music Featured:

Duration:: 55m
Broadcast on:: 03 Jan 2016
Audio Format:: other

[music] Let us sing this song for the healing of the world That we may hear as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along And our lives will feel the echo of our healing [music] Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpes Me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world That we may dream as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along Today we're headed over to the University of Wisconsin Stout to check out their Peace Studies program. For those of you not local to this area, you may not know that this particular campus of the UW system is mostly known as a hard sciences hotbed, a place where practical subjects are taught. So it may surprise some that Stout students can get a peace studies minor, but that is the case, and a primary force behind this program is James Handley, who is a senior lecturer in both critical geography and peace and non-violence studies. And I decided that an in-depth visit with Jim would be a good idea after I spoke to his intro class just recently. Also joining us are two of the students from the program, Emma Cornick was in the Intro Peace Studies class this past semester, and Shelby Schupie is a UW Stout graduate who had a minor in Peace Studies. Jim Handley, Emma Cornick, and Shelby Schupie all join me here today on the UW Stout campus. Jim, thank you so much for joining me today for Spirit in Action. Thanks a lot for having me Mark, I really appreciate it. Emma and Shelby, I'm really glad you both could join us today too. Hi, thanks for having us too. Now again where this started, I was invited by Jim to speak to a peace studies class here at the University of Wisconsin Stout. I came, I met Emma who was in that class. It seemed a quite lively class, and I want to just ask you right away Emma, how do you experience peace studies here? I understand it's not a specific career direction for you. What I kind of got out of peace studies was a different perspective of what I would have normally looked at. I learned a lot of new things about a lot of people and kind of got to see a different side of Stout because I'm involved in the mainstream stuff. And Shelby, you graduated from Stout back in May. You took peace studies, I think you had it as a minor. How did you get into peace studies? I know that that's not the kind of thing that is generally on the front pages for UW Stout. Well, I got involved with peace studies by chance because I went to Scotland and studied some political science classes there and then met a professor who was good friends with Jim actually and who teaches peace studies at Superior. And he said that I should join him on a trip to Bosnia. So I ended up getting really interested in the conflict that happened there and peace studies in general and then also peace studies in Menominee on kind of a smaller scale and on a very large scale. And maybe the biggest mystery of all is how did you get into peace studies, Jim? Geography, I understand, was kind of your specialty and in particularly GIS, geographic information systems. I know it's a specialty, it's what your master's thesis was about. So how did you get into peace studies? This does not seem 100% intuitive. Well, first, you know, I've been really fortunate in that Stout has allowed me to create this niche of peace studies and really I guess where it started probably ultimately is through my interest in activism probably from the time I was young and I say young maybe in my early 20s. I've been an activist for peace and social justice and so it's always been an interest of mine. When I got here to Stout, I developed the program in geographic information systems and that went really well and I know most people don't equate geography with social justice or peace but the two are very much related and have a lot of overlap in that when you look at issues of social justice. For instance, I teach a class called the geography of food which is really a class on food justice but we look at our food system through a geographic lens and so we see that access has a geographic component to it. When we look at different communities and how they relate to the food system, there's a geography component to that. So it's been an interest of mine and ultimately we were at a time where we were developing new curriculum. The opportunity came up to develop this minor and I should say that it was me, Dr. Euryos Loizidis who is a sociologist in the department and Dr. Alec Kirby who was a historian in our department who unfortunately passed away but it was the three of us that really got together and decided that we were going to have this minor. I mentioned Jim, your master's thesis which was the role of GIS in environmental education. So environmentalism obviously is part of your activism. When you mentioned social activism that you were into from in your 20s, what kind of roles are you talking about? I guess my original foray into activism was affordable housing and a group called housing now which dealt with homelessness when I was living in Green Bay but along those lines it was generally social justice. So there was an environmental component to that where it was mostly local issues that we dealt with that we helped organize communities around and my bachelor's degree is in environmental policy and planning and so I did have an interest in that along the way. So Jim, since you're part of starting up the peace studies here, what goes into creating such a program? I'm sure there's lots of colleges, universities that do not yet have any kind of peace studies and yet I think it's a pretty fruitful thing for all of us to be looking at in the United States. What's the nitty gritty of getting something started and I don't mean permission from this office? I mean what did you have to gather in terms of building a curriculum? Well fortunately I didn't have to reinvent the wheel. Peace studies has been around really it took hold in the 1980s and it was really as a dealt with mostly nuclear war at the time. It came out of more of security studies. The program that we developed here I would say is definitely a hybrid. We certainly do explore the issues of war, of weapons of mass destruction, of terrorism, so violence on a global scale. But we also address issues of personal violence, violence that we engage in in our everyday lives and we reflect on how we ourselves engage in that violence. And then on the contrary we look at approaches to non-violence. So from Saint Thomas Aquinas, to Prophet Muhammad, to Jesus, to Gandhi, to Martin Luther King, to contemporary peace activists. And I know that Stout probably isn't as well known for peace studies as they are for our engineering programs or for our construction management program. That said I think there was a niche that this curriculum filled. Our peace studies classes are really popular. We fill a class of 35 every semester. We could offer two if we had the capacity to do that. So Stout students are engaged in this type of learning. And so to develop a rigorous academic program around these ideas I'm really filled a niche. As you said Jim, this is not a university that is thought of for maybe even the social sciences. It's engineering, it's math, it's computer, it's a number of really wonderful strong programs here. But social sciences is not what I think of when I think of Stout even though it's 30 miles from my home. Emma, why did you end up taking the peace studies classes? Because you heard that Jim is such a wonderful stimulating teacher. What was it that led you here? It filled a general requirement and I thought why not? And it is something that I had never considered either. It's something that I didn't even really consider to be a topic or know to be a topic or a class. So that was interesting to me and figured why not. Are you a person who likes to stretch yourself, learn new things, go different places? Of course, yeah. I definitely like to experience a lot of new things. I will try anything once within reason. And Shelby, what about you? How did you get into this? I think you ended up with the minor in peace studies. Was this something that was on your radar before? Is this something that grew on you when you got here? Well, so I went to Scotland like I had mentioned before and when I was there I talked to the professor who I was there with who knew Jim and just encouraged me to get in touch with him. So I guess it kind of started in superior with that professor because he showed us around to some peace activists in Scotland who were working to get their nuclear base out of Scotland. And so I got really interested in activism and then he said, you know, go talk to Jim at Stout because he's working on the peace studies minor there. And so that's kind of where it led to. The piece I was really asking about was this activism stuff. Had you not been connected with activism before? Had you been interested in it? Had role models or mentors who led you in that direction? I'm really looking for how this peace studies course has changed you. Yeah, I would say I definitely did not have any of this on my radar before. I was always the type person who helped everyone out but never to the extent of understanding what peace studies was or activism or anything. I didn't think that was an option to be active and actively work towards nonviolence until I started talking to Jim and the professor from Superior that I spent time with. And Jim, for you, you've been doing this enough years that you've been able to see some students change. You've seen eyes open and maybe others just fall asleep during your class. I know that there's a full range of students who will take any kind of class. I've taught physics and I had people who were taking it for a requirement who were perfectly happy to let it go by. But what about for you? Who can you name who's actually changed or you see some of the evidence of the value of what you're teaching? Well, I think certainly I think the way generally my department approaches, I think social sciences in general and maybe peace studies specifically, the idea of education, I mean, we look at education as a lot of times preparing us for our careers. And that certainly is important and valuable and we need people that have advanced industrial and technical skills and stout is unique in how it prepares students for that. I would say that in peace studies, we really look at the role of education as helping us reach our full potential as human beings. So the idea with that is that the things that get in our way of reaching our potential as human beings are oppression and violence and other things like that. And so to have a whole curriculum around how we can liberate ourselves from that oppression and violence and help society in general do that, I think is an amazing opportunity. And I think that there have been several students, I think, that have had transformative experiences in peace studies in general. For instance, I mean, I think we have students now that have created a student organization on campus. Shelby actually was a founding member of a student organization called Peace Initiatives, which helped kind of bridge a lot of the other organizations in ways around peace and social justice. That has morphed now and students have taken the role to kind of take that to an organization called Students Unite, which is modeled after SNCC, after the student nonviolent coordinating committees of the 1960s, who were a large part of the civil rights movement. So Shelby, you're part of founding Peace Initiatives, what was your idea on that and how many, was this 20 of you who came together, was this you leading the way, or how did that go? Well, to start off, I guess it was kind of me leading the way, trying to gather students, and then it eventually turned into a core group of probably about five or so students just working with as many groups on campus as possible. So we started out as a core group, but then worked with various other organizations on campus who maybe weren't able to come to meetings, organize with us, stuff like that. And the basics behind it was that we wanted a group that focused on peace. There are a lot of organizations on campus that focus on different facets of peace, but not peace as a whole. So with that, we wanted to work with those groups that had the different ideas of peace, but bring it all together into one space that everybody could share in this idea and spread it out further. This word "peace" is one of those words that has a lot of different meanings in English, just like love has, you know, there's love of your brother, your sister, your love of the cousin of a child. There's so many different kinds of love. You might love Doritos corn chips. What does peace mean to you, Emma, now that you've sat through a peace studies class? And I'm particularly interested in how your concept of what is peace or what's important about peace has changed because of sitting through this class. Prior to the class, I had never really thought much about it. I honestly kind of thought that peace was just the anti-war, which we had talked about in our class. But now I kind of view peace as almost just being respectful of other people and their beliefs. I think that peace is also finding a better way to resolve conflict without having to get too emotional or physical with anybody and just figuring out a way to communicate with people on a level that they'll understand and respect. But does this actually apply to your life? I'm assuming you haven't been in too many boxing matches, or I don't know what kind of family you come from. My family was pretty lively. Well, I am a bartender here in Menominee, so I'd like to consider myself a peacemaker every Friday and Saturday night. When people drink, they get confident and cocky and a little too ambitious, and sometimes there are people that end up throwing a couple punches or deciding to verbally attack somebody. A lot of the times, as a bartender, you see it way before the bouncers do because it's right in front of your face. You know, whereas the bouncers are at the door in the bathroom or washing dishes, so you kind of end up just inserting yourself into a problem. And the ideal is to stop it as quickly as possible to not escalate it, and sometimes depending on what you do or how you speak to either of those people that could be in an altercation, you may have just made it worse instead of making it better. So for me, which I kind of learned was being a bartender, and that training is knowing how to talk to people in the kind of tone of voice that you use, because anything can set anybody off, especially when alcohol is involved. So you're saying that you have practical consequences in your life, working as a bartender from taking peace studies? Sure. Now, I'm not sure you were fully behind that, sure. I've definitely used some of the tools and thought a little bit more about how I interact with people based on what I've learned in peace studies. You know, when you came in and you had talked about how you split up a fight by just kind of standing in the middle of them and being like, "What are you doing?" I've tried that since you were... I'm looking for the scars. And it's not as effective, but it definitely is better than getting involved in the violence. And from my point of view, the best thing that you can do is stand between them and just kind of push them away from each other and whisper in their ear. Like, think about what you're doing right now, because is it worth it? Do you even know what you're fighting about? And most of the time, people don't. You know, I think that if you asked anybody, you know, in the middle of a fight or right afterwards, "Why are you doing this?" They wouldn't really have a concrete answer or anything that would make sense or that's logical most of the time. So Shelby, you got to take a lot more classes. You didn't just take the intro class. How have you actually put it to work? What has this really changed in your life? I mean, I know there's a lot of important issues in the world. Anybody who's visited Yugoslavia, Serbia, or whichever areas you were in, you know that there's some really horrible consequences of not having people work for peace. What does this actually change on the concrete level for the kind of work that you do? Well, I guess that's a big question. So I have a few different ways of going about this. I'd say the way that the Peace Studies program helped was that it gives you that view of what's going on internationally and different ways that we, maybe as a whole, as a country can work to eliminate different violences that are international, but also brings you back to realize that there's a lot of stuff going on locally or even personally between you and somebody you're living with or somebody you're working with. And so it gives you a lot of those skills to work with people who are right next to you. And so I guess the way that I've taken that is one way is with just communicating with people. Learning to communicate how I'm feeling, how they might be feeling, really genuinely caring about the person who's sitting next to you and what they're thinking in the situation that's going on. And then also moving forward to a lot of stuff that I like to do is awareness building basically. And so in Menominee, we have a really, really great community, but we're lacking a little bit in the diversity aspect. And so what I'm working on now is for the upcoming MLK Day is organizing an art show that embraces peace and diversity. And so it's that type of stuff where I'm trying to work with the community to really build that in, especially with the Stout community, because we have so many diverse students that want to work with the community but don't know how. And so I'm working on bridging that gap with the community and with Stout. The classes definitely lead to that because you learn these big picture ideas, but you also learn that it needs to be done at home as well. And there's so many simple ways to get that done. Let's come back to you, Jim, because after all, you're a force behind this right now at UW Stout. And I do want to remind our listeners that we are speaking with James Handley. He is a senior lecturer at the University of Wisconsin Stout. We're also speaking with two students and former students. Emma Cornack just finished a semester long of peace studies, and Shelby Schupie graduated with a minor in peace studies this past May. So people looking at peace studies from different directions. Now this is Spirit in Action, which is Norton Spirit Radio Production. We're on the web at northernspiritradio.org, where you'll find more than 10 and a half years of our programs for free listening and download. You'll also find links to our guests. So you can look up Jim Handley and the program that he's doing here at UW Stout. There's also a place to post comments. We love two-way communication. Communication, as Shelby just mentioned, is so important, and so please add your voice. And through that we can grow and knowledge. And the way forward to peace has so many contributions. Yours is vital, so please post comment when you visit. There's also a place to donate. This effort is totally supported by your donations. So please do click donate when you visit. Even more important in supporting Northern Spirit Radio is to support the local community radio stations wherever you live. It is so crucial in our country to have alternative voices who are driven by different motives than what just mainstream is producing in terms of our media. So please support your local community radio station and guarantee that we have an alternative voice in terms of music and news and all the different ways that people are thinking in this country. Again, Jim Handley is here. He teaches in geography and in peace studies at UW Stout. And I was just going to ask you, Jim, a little bit more about the details of the programs. Number one, how many courses are there? What's the most on the edge type program that you teach? One that stretches maybe the students or maybe the school environment the most? Sure. Well, the structure of the program itself is that we have three core courses in the minor. So we have an introduction to applied peace studies. We have a conflict resolution and analysis course. And then we have a peace study seminar. And this is primarily for the peace studies minors. It's kind of a capstone class where we kind of reflect on what we've learned throughout the entire program. So really, we have a core, kind of the foundation of the course is the teachings of Martin Luther King and the six principles of nonviolence that he taught and the six steps of social change that kind of are those principles of nonviolence in action. So from there, we go into conflict reconciliation, which the way we approach conflict is that conflict isn't necessarily a bad thing. That conflict is a normal part of living with other human beings, and that ultimately it can be good. Without conflict, we don't have the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Without conflict, we still have apartheid in South Africa. So we approach conflict as something that is potentially positive. It's our response to conflict that generally is the negative. As far as kind of stretching students a bit, I would say when we talk about the war on terror, with the idea that we're presented what I like to think of as a dual fallacy. I mean, we're they're presented with the idea of bombing people or putting ourselves in jeopardy of terrorist attacks. And so those are really the two options that mainstream media and the current, most of the politicians will present to us. There's a thousand things in between there that we could do. So as a group, we explore those things, reflecting on whether we ourselves engage in terrorism. If our friends, our allies engage in terrorism. If ultimately, and this is probably where we get a lot of eyebrows raised, should we talk to terrorists? I mean, if we're fighting with people, the idea to reconcile that conflict would be ultimately to communicate with those people. The idea of the United States sitting down with the Taliban or with a Daesh or with al-Qaeda seems really preposterous to people and almost anti-American. I would dispute that. So, Emma and Shelby, evidently, this concept was presented to you in class. He must have said that kind of thing before you in class. What was your reaction? Did it make sense? Do you have some comment on that, Shelby? Yeah, so, I mean, it was a while ago now that I took that class, but all the topics come up constantly in every peace studies class that you take, basically, or anything that focuses on peace studies. And I wouldn't say that it was a totally foreign concept, I guess. I think the War on Terror is something that has been brought up in a few other classes that I've taken. And so, it's not totally new that that is a topic that relates to peace, I guess. I guess I think that it is something that I automatically associated with peace and that War on Terror is something that needs to be talked about. It's not something that we should shy away from, especially in peace studies, because we can't have a War on Terror not talk about what we're missing in it, which is the peace that could come from it if we weren't constantly fighting and not talking to people that we need to talk to. Have you had particularly, I don't know, violent reactions when you suggest in that class, people who get in your face and say, you know, you're a traitor, or I'm assuming students might have that reaction, but I also assume that administration might have the reaction like, no, you should walk softly there. Yeah, certainly students have had, some students have had a strong reaction. And I guess it goes back to the whole idea of learning, of challenging what we know, of changing our minds. You know, I tell students that if they come in as freshmen, and they've already, they're 18, so they have a worldview, they know most things that they think that they're ever going to know, if they have that same worldview when they leave stout, four or five, or sometimes six years later, we fail them. I think that the idea is we're changing our minds, we're changing how we look at the world through our education system. I hope that I, even as an educator, that I'm open enough to consider new ideas and think about the world in different ways. So certainly we have that. I have to say this, that the administration has been very supportive of the program. My college dean, Dr. Maria Alm, the chair of my department, Dr. Bob Zydell, they've been very supportive of the program. And at an institution where we have academic freedom, I really feel comfortable in dealing with these issues in the classroom. Again, Jim, the way that I got in touch with you is you contacted the Eau Claire Quaker meeting that I'm part of. You said, would anybody be interested in coming talking about Quakers and peace, nonviolence, and so I volunteered? It did strike me that there's a kind of a presumption in the United States that we shouldn't push religion, and I think that's good that we're not trying to push religion. But a lot of people react to even the presence of discussing religion as being negative. Now it seemed to me that when you were talking about the foundational people in terms of working on peace, you kept naming all the religious people. I didn't hear a lot of secular people name there, and is that just because you forgot their names temporarily? Or is it because there is some significant connection of peace and nonviolence or religion? Certainly we do talk about secular traditions in peace and nonviolence. We talk about A.J. Musti and other people like that that come from a different angle. That said, a lot of the great peace thinkers have come from a spiritual or religious background. And I think it's important that we, as a society, understand that a lot of times it's not the teachings that are the problem. It's the people that misinterpret the teachings that are the problem. And so we do, we have a whole section in the Intro to Peace Studies class where we do address nonviolence through a religious lens. So we look at nonviolence in Eastern religions, so in Buddhism, in Hinduism, in Jainism. We look at peace in the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Islam and Christianity, as well as other religions that have addressed kind of peace and nonviolence. And I'm really not shy. Nobody comes to my class and nobody pays the tuition to listen to my religious views or listen to my political views in general. And I try to keep those as much to myself as I can. That said, we have really good, meaningful, valuable discussions as a class when it comes to religion. You know, I tell students that the class, like the Intro to Peace Studies class, is a political class in the sense that it's the vocation of the people to lead to social justice. So we don't get into partisan politics very much. We don't get into kind of the nitty gritty, but generally as politics, as power, we do talk about that a lot. One of the things, Jim, I just want to make sure you tune in to Spirit and Action in the Future. Probably about three or four weeks down the road, I'll be interviewing a woman named Rachel McNair who wrote a book on nonviolence in religion. And she's going through all the world religions and talking about that. And she had some very interesting observations because a lot of people not only associate some of the figures of peace, you know, Jesus, you know, love your neighbor or if people know about the Baja Khan or other folks that have been so important, Martin Luther King, a devout Baptist in that case. Yet when people think of Baptists today, they probably don't think of peace. And people like Dorothy Day, who's Catholic and other things, people today tend to think of religion, I think primarily as a force for violence or in support of war. Do you see the disconnection there? How do you explain that disconnection? I certainly see the disconnect right now and that and that again. When we think of institutionalized religion, I think now it does have this connotation of leading to conflict, sectarian conflict, interfaith conflict. And, you know, I think with current events, especially, it's been amplified. I do think when we look at the teachings of the major religions, I would say it's not just a part of those religions. But when we look at the major institutionalized religions right now, the foundational piece of those religions is loving one another, is loving one another, so love someone, even love your enemy. And the idea of loving your enemy seems radical and certainly in today's political discourse, it seems like a radical idea, but that's ultimately, you can't get around that. You know, in all the religions, there's the golden rule. Treat someone like you would like to be treated. Well, if that indeed is the case, then how can we support economic systems that lead to and are reliant upon people living in poverty without enough material wealth to lead a dignified life? How can we support systems of militarism that lead to suffering and terror? I'm glad, Jim, that you're not the interviewer because otherwise I'd have to answer that question, and I'm not sure I have the answer for it. You just talked about religion and spirituality and the important part they've played, and foundational in terms of leading up to what we understand would be a world of peace. What's been your connection to religion and/or spirituality past and present? I wish that was an easy answer, and I grew up Lutheran, but really have engaged in study of the teachings of the Buddha. And I would say, and here's where it might not be as simple as I'd like it to be, I don't think that Gautama, the Buddha, wanted an institutionalized religion to begin with. I think that that was something that was made up after his death, so I certainly, I guess from my own religious or spiritual exploration, that's really where I come from, is that I look more towards the teachings of the Buddha and what he taught. That said, I don't think that one needs a religion to be a peace activist or a social justice activist. We have well-documented humanists that have been engaged in great social justice activities throughout history. And I just want to take a moment with you, Emma and Shelby, to find out your perspective. Again, this religious spiritual, I think that it's so influential. What I would actually call spiritual is much bigger than most people think of as spiritual. Anything that is the big reason for why things have value or don't have value, I think is spiritual. What are those words for you, Emma, and how did that influence how you came into the class and how you reacted to the class? Well, I was raised Catholic initially, and then we just kind of stopped going to church, and my mom's like, "We should go to church." And then we became Lutheran, so I kind of switched back and forth. They're very similar. I went to a Catholic school when I was younger, Catholics are very strict and conservative. So, coming into the class, I've had a conservative view on a lot of things, so a lot of it was new for me. A lot of it was things that I hadn't necessarily heard or opinions that I hadn't ever thought to think about, because I have been raised in a conservative bubble, which hasn't been a negative or a bad thing. It's just I haven't been exposed to a lot of the opinions of my other classmates. And what about you Shelby, where do you come from, where are you now? I was raised Lutheran and actually went to all of my schooling up until the end of high school was at a Lutheran school as well. And so, that was pretty interesting going from that to coming to a public college and getting to experience the differences there. I would say probably the same experience where I was around a lot of very conservative thoughts that was actively advertised in the classroom. You know, especially voting, what way people were voting and everything, which wasn't bad. I guess I was raised in a family that was mostly Democrat, going to a school that was mostly conservative thinking. So, I was pretty interesting having that dynamic of having going to school, having one way of thinking, then going home and having my family say no, they're wrong, basically. But it created this weird understanding for me. So, I understand where the religious side comes from, then I understand where maybe the not religious side comes from. And I see the value in both, because right now I'm not religious really anymore. So, it's different seeing it from this lens, but I also see a lot of value in the religious groups that have these movements that they're working in. And I think it's really valuable with the community organizing that comes from religious institutions or groups or spiritual groups too. So, I think it's been good that having an open mind coming into everything with experiencing both sides. As I said when I presented to the class, I think that community and working together with other folks is so important. You mentioned Martin Luther King. The civil rights work was so important because a central organizing piece of that was all these churches. When we have spirituality, I absolutely agree that absolutely anyone can be a force for peace, whether they have a specific spiritual identity or not. But still, I find that there's power coming together with other folks. Is there a way that you find Jim a place to come together with other folks to nurture that kind of deep force within you? Certainly, I think here in Menominee, we are really fortunate in that we have a Vipassana meditation center. I was a part of the group that brought it about, and with the idea that this meditation center, Vipassana meditation is a kind of a non-sectarian form of meditation. Vipassana means seeing things in a certain way or seeing reality as it really is. The idea that we're not going to be led down the path of peace by people that are filled with anger and ill will and animosity and greed. To develop tools that we can use in our own personal lives that can eradicate those mental defilements, I think is important. I think that might be where you're coming from with the idea of spiritualness being really important for peace work. The meditation center, which is called Dhamma Vasudhi, has had hundreds of people come from all over the world to Menominee, Wisconsin to learn this technique of meditation, which ultimately leads to this eradication of those mental defilements. We find that naturally, when we eradicate those bad things out of our minds, good things take their place. This love and compassion and empathy take their place. The meditation center, being able to come together with a group of people to work on ourselves individually, but also as a community has been really, really important to me. I want to come back to an idea that has been resurfacing in my mind regularly throughout this conversation. Again, we're speaking with Jim Handley, who is a senior lecturer at the University of Wisconsin Stout in Peace Studies. He also teaches geography classes here at various arts, GIS. If you want to know where things are located, Jim's the person you want to talk to. But you've mentioned a number of times that your social activism is what led you eventually to peace studies. Sometimes it seems to me that there is an area of conflict, shall we say, between justice and peace. That is to say that sometimes when you go after a particular item, maybe it's inequality, social inequality, that violence erupts exactly because you're addressing that. I realize that violence is not limited to someone hitting another person or shooting them. There's all kinds of violence that happens because of lack of justice. What is the connection that you see and you teach about, Jim, in terms of justice and of peace? Are they the same thing? Are they supplementary, complementary? Are they sometimes opposed? The way we approach it in class is that justice is a necessary part of the kind of peace that we want to develop. There's really, and it comes from in the early 20th century, Jane Adams, really kind of separated positive peace from negative peace. With the idea that negative peace is the absence of overt violence and positive peace is the presence of justice. We have a lot of societies. We have a lot of communities, even in the United States maybe, that are living in peace, that don't have violence that has come to the surface. But we have situations of oppression, situations of unequal power where we would just say that there isn't that justice component along with that. And that's kind of how we look at it in our peace studies, and the idea that when we do engage in conflict and look, peace activists ultimately are going to create conflict. That's part of our job is to create conflict. We do it purposefully, but we do it non-violently and we do it creatively in ways that, you know, I think when we look at the great teachers, the great peace thinkers, the means and the ends are very much related. And so we certainly wouldn't engage in violence or engage in oppression with the idea that the end result would somehow be justice or just. At least that's not how we approach it in our peace studies program. It really is centered on the six principles and non-violence that King taught. I think maybe, Jim, I want to ask you about a specific case. I've spent some time thinking about, again, because I'm Quaker, and I didn't start out that way. I actually learned it because I came to it as an adult, you know, as when you grow up in things you don't necessarily know about them, necessarily from the inside. So Quakers are known for peace involvement. They're also known for a lot of justice work. So, for instance, it's understood that Quakers were very involved in the Underground Railroad. And yet I see a rub in that. I think that slavery was on its way out because of the Industrial Revolution, because we were turning to machines, and so we no longer needed lots of bodies of slaves doing work. So I think that perhaps if we had been a bit more patient, we might not have had to have the Civil War with all the people that died in that war, all the violence that was done in that war. So that's one of the cases where I've really wondered whether totally well-intentioned people, people very concerned about justice, have led to causing war because of their impatience for justice. Well, a couple things. I think that Martin Luther King would probably say that people had already waited 340 years for justice. So the idea of just being patient may have been a stretch. I think, too, I think the other thing with that is that if you identify a system that leads to oppression, that leads to injustice, that leads to violence, I agree with Howard Zinn. I don't think you can stand still on a moving train. I think that you either resist those systems, or at least implicitly you're supporting those systems. So the idea that someone wouldn't resist slavery, I would say one could look at that is implicitly supporting the system of slavery. I certainly have that kind of reaction within myself, but then I also know that there's times when there's a conflict facing off, and there is injustice involved. And yet the cool down time is so important, as opposed to, "Well, no, we'll just take this from you, give it to the other person because that's what's just." So I feel a little bit conflicted about the deep levels of how we make peace. One of the accusations that gets pointed at university sometimes is living in ivory tower, talking about stuff instead of doing it. Is there a way in which you, Jim, are engaging not only in the ideas with classes, but are actually nitty-gritty on the ground doing peace? And I would say a couple things to that. First of all, we've had students actually engage in demonstrations on campus. We had, and Shelby was part of, a group of students that staged a die-in to bring attention to our drone warfare and some of the ill effects of the drone warfare. So students have certainly taken that upon themselves to do. The other thing is that last summer I had the great fortune to go to the University of Rhode Island and study at the center of non-violence and peace studies there for two weeks to become a certified non-violence. And that really is in the spirit. Martin Luther King's last wish before he died was that we would institutionalize and internationalize non-violence. The center at the University of Rhode Island and these trainings are in that spirit, and they were developed by Dr. Bernard Lafayette, who was one of the co-founders of SNCC. And because of that training now, I'm starting to facilitate non-violence trainings for community members, for campus members, and for different groups where people come together for a day or two days. And we learn the principles of non-violence as taught by Martin Luther King and how to apply those principles in our personal lives as well as in our social lives. Sounds like great stuff you're doing on campus and off campus. I love to see a person living out in the world what they're speaking about at their job and that those two should be in harmony. It's not always easy to do that because there's constant pressures to conform to norms that may or may not be helpful to our ideals. What about the future of peace studies at the University of Wisconsin Stout? Jim Handley is one of the teachers here in that field. I think some other people are working in that area. Is it going to grow? Is it something that's spreading or maybe this will become known mainly as a peace studies campus one day? Oh, that would be wonderful. It is growing. The minor is growing. And, you know, I'm part of a group of, we call ourselves the peace studies steering committee where we get together. And one of the things that we've been talking about is how to elevate the prominence of peace studies on campus. And really, right now our mantra has been now more than ever. We need peace studies now more than ever. And so there's a couple avenues that we're looking at certainly to share with other program directors and departments how peace studies fits in with their programs as well. So the environmental science program, for instance, to look at how we do violence, you can look at our relationship with the environment through the lens of violence. Looking at other programs, the early childhood education program, if our future teachers can learn how to instill principles of non-violence in kids in the K-12 system, that would certainly be a huge endeavor and victory. The other thing that we're looking at is taking our minor and potentially even looking at a concentration within the Applied Social Science major and looking at it through a wide array of different avenues to elevate both the attention that peace studies gets as well as the prominence that it plays. Look, we here at Stout, we pride ourselves with producing graduates that have advanced industrial and technical skills, and Stout does an excellent, excellent job of that. But if those students go out and they apply those industrial and technical skills without an ethical or moral framework, we could potentially do more harm than good. And so the idea of bringing peace studies into a wider array of programs, whether it's construction management, whether it's engineering, whether it's, you know, whatever it is, I think ultimately will benefit our students and our graduates and ultimately benefit society. And I do think there's a tremendous benefit that comes to society as peace studies is sewn into, integrated with all of our disciplines and our ways of thinking. And so I'm really thankful that you're advancing that kind of work with ever-increasing groups of students, Jim. And I want to thank you, Emma, for cutting your teeth on this topic, opening your horizons, and for finding what person you're going to be in the future by taking part in peace studies. Thank you so much for joining me, Emma. Thank you, Mark. And Shelby, I know that you're doing AmeriCorps work right now, which is a wonderful gift to our nation, and I hope it's rewarding work for you, as well as challenging. Definitely challenging, but it's been awesome work, and I'm excited to see where it takes me. And Jim, I'm so excited for how you've helped birth this program here at University of Wisconsin Stout and how you're moving forward into the future to influence even more lives for the good of the planet. Thanks a lot, Mark. This has been a lot of fun, and it's been fun exploring the kind of the role of education and specifically peace education with you, and so I appreciate the chance to share that. Again, we've been visiting today with James Handley, Senior Lecturer in Peace Studies and Geography here at the University of Wisconsin Stout, and with a current student, Emma Kornick, and a former student, Shelby Schupie. Before I sign off, I want to share with you a song on the theme of those working devotedly for Peace and Justice. It's written by one of my past guests for both Song of the Soul and Spirit in Action, Pat Humphries, performed here on her collaboration with Sandio called Emma's Revolution, and the song is Bound for Freedom. I hope you feel as charged by the song in the same way I do, and we'll see you next week for Spirit in Action. Emma's Revolution, Performing Bound for Freedom. In Montgomery and in Selma, and the streets of Birmingham, the people send a message to the leaders of the land we have fought, and we have suffered. But we know they're all from right, we are family, we are neighbors, we are black and we are white. Here I go, Bound for Freedom, they might truth, take the lead, not the preacher, not the converse, not the millionaire, but me. I'm organized for justice, I will raise my voice and song, and our children will be free to lead the world, carry on. From the South Pennsylvania, from and you're made on death row, will me I have the courage to expose the evil show, from the courtroom to the border. In the television's player, I would really live off war, and hungry people everywhere. Here I go, Bound for Freedom, they might truth, take the lead, not the preacher, not the converse, not the millionaire, but me. I'm organized for justice, I will raise my voice and song, and our children will be free to lead the world, carry on. Here I go, Bound standing on my own, I remember those before me, and I know I'm not alone. I'm organized for justice, I will raise my voice and song, and our children will be free to lead the world, carry on. From the streets of New York City, across the ocean and beyond, people from all nations, create a compound from the conscience as our weapon. We are witness to the fall, we are simple, we are brilliant, we are one, and we are all, Bound for Freedom, they might truth, take the lead, not the preacher, not the converse, not the millionaire, but me. I'm organized for justice, I will raise my voice and song, and our children will be free to lead the world, carry on. Here I go, Bound standing on my own, I remember those before me, and I know I'm not alone. I'm organized for justice, I will raise my voice and song, and our children will be free to lead the world, carry on. The theme music for this program is "Turning of the World", performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along, and our lives will feel the echo of our healing. (upbeat music)

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