On 13 August 2024, Dr. Threase Finnegan-Kessie (Maynooth University Department of Design Innovation), Dr. Ian Marder (Maynooth University School of Law and Criminology) and Ashleigh Pillay (Maynooth University School of Law and Criminology) hosted a group of academics and students from the University of Texas at Austin. As part of an innovative, interdisciplinary project at the University of Texas, sixteen students and four academics from different disciplines spent the previous three weeks travelling around the island of Ireland, spending most of their time in the North to learn about historic and ongoing peacebuilding and reconciliation processes.
Students worked in interdisciplinary groups of four, developing their projects throughout the trip. The four projects on which the students were working involved telling young people stories of reconciliation, the role of trauma-informed practice in maximising professional productivity, considering muralism and remembrance in gentrified spaces, and using origami to address the multifaceted experiences of first-generation college students.
The workshop, which bookended the trip, aimed to help students organise their thinking and learning from their travels, and consider how they might bring this learning back to Texas. They started with a restorative circle, discussing what they learned on the trip and what surprised them. This was followed by a design workshop, in which they identified problem statements, completed empathy maps, came up with and voted on different ideas to solve the problems identified, and then rapidly prototyped their ideas and pitched these to the wider group.
The project at the University of Texas at Austin, Leading with Peace, aims to engage students in methods from history, social work and economics to better understand the process of local, regional, and national reconciliation, using the Northern Irish conflict as an example of individual, institutional and community trauma. They were hosted in the North by Corrymeela, an established and highly regarded centre for repairing relationships, developing leaders, and identifying sustainable strategies for responding to violence and settling conflicts.
The workshop represented the fourth visit to Maynooth University for one of the project leads, Prof. Noël Busch-Armendariz, who previously attended the Summer Institute in Restorative Justice and Design innovation and has guest lectured on the MSocSc in Social Work.