Monday 6th November.
I am curious about the way people in local communities share their opinions and wishes about how they want to live, or how they manage to influence those controlling money and resources. This curiosity has led me to wonder how rural communities in the U.K. negotiate to keep, and source, services, and the ways they make their needs known to government or agencies. In this I have been working with a small voluntary organisation for many years. My work on Unarmed Civilian Peacekeeping is about how communities use protection strategies to help create new relationships in their areas and how this enables them to create spaces for peace. The communities we live in are incredibly complex, many individuals, families, businesses and services all in a web and then relating to the other intermediate and national levels of decision-making, and I am seeking ways of understanding this complexity and how we could be giving it more power.
I think it’s important that communities can influence what happens to them because if we want peace, then it is about strong relationships and trust, but in order for people to have the space and energy to build these, then basic needs of shelter, food, safety and health need to be met…and so being able to communicate needs, and get support for meeting those needs, means communities being able to speak.
Our research in Myanmar is exploring this focus on the importance of communities by taking one step further and wondering how we can learn and understand what communities know and want by listening to how they give meaning to aspects of culture. In Myanmar we will be talking to people about their culture, and through stories, music, art, and craft learn about how communities see themselves and the way they communicate their knowledge and ideas to others. Myanmar is a place we can learn a lot from because of the dramatic changes it has undergone in recent years and so people in communities will have new options.
As well as being able to learn more about the roles communities take on themselves, and the way meaning is expressed through culture, we will be reflecting on the link between conflict, violence and peace in relation to cultural stories.